Utah County Clerk Kim Jackson said that while it was disappointing that everything did not work out perfectly, the good news was that the integrity of the election never seemed to be in question.

"It's positive in the sense we know we have a good backup if this happens," Jackson said. "The positive is that when voters tried to use the cards that weren't encoded, the voting machines gave us an error message rather than allowing people to vote and not counting the votes."

For Salt Lake County, the early morning problems were corrected by 9 a.m., and many polling places in the evening did not experience the lengthy waits that had concerned election officials. One precinct did report initial problems with their encoder, but that was also fixed within a couple of hours.

Difficulties experienced by voters were closer to the glitches for David Fidler, a Salt Lake resident, who could not get one of his votes to register. Eventually, a poll worker had to press the button for the opposite vote, clear that vote, and then cast the vote he wanted.

When the election judge told him he probably didn't press it hard enough, he said, "I'm a man. Believe me, I pressed it."

The new machines were required for every state by this year's election by the Help America Vote Act, which was passed in 2002 following the 2000 election problems. All punch card ballots, which Utah had been using, are no longer permitted.

The new machines allowed many blind voters to cast ballots without assistance for the first time because of audio ballot options, and the HAVA law also imposed tighter restrictions on accessibility for the disabled.

Alison Draper, an advocate at the Disability Law Center, said volunteers had checked the state's polling places in the past two weeks to ensure the disabled would have access, and a number of problems were discovered.

"A lot of counties have made significant effort," Draper said. Two years ago, the center checked more than 300 polling locations throughout Utah "and not one was (disability) accessible."

The machines received favorable review from Chris Partridge of Clinton, both of whom were using them for the first time.

"It was very clear as to how I voted," he said.

Not everyone trusted the machines, though. U.S. Senate candidate Pete Ashdown, a Democrat challenging Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chose to vote with a paper provisional ballot because of mistrust of the machines.

"Throughout this campaign, I've been telling people we need to return to paper and pencils" for voting, he said. "It would have been disingenuous to vote on a machine."

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Contributing: Joe Bauman, Joe Dougherty and New York Times News Service

E-mail: jloftin@desnews.com; twalch@desnews.com