Despite some problems, Utahns continue to head to the polls

SALT LAKE CITY — Utahns continued to file into polling places Tuesday to cast their ballots in a crucial 2010 midterm election, despite several problems reported throughout the state.

Historically some of the lowest voter turnout rates are reported during midterm elections. But Utah's elections director Mark Thomas predicted up to a 60 percent turnout this year.

Todd Taylor, executive director of the Utah Democratic Party, said voter participation generally appeared to be strong in the morning, but slowed by the afternoon.

"There have been few problems reported to us on this Election Day as of 1 p.m. We are pleased to say that election officials have been very responsive and in some case have proactively reported the problems directly to us here at the Democratic Party," he said.

Among the problems elections and political leaders were facing include:

 Local school board candidates were left off the ballot in two precincts in Iron County. The candidates were later added to the appropriate ballots, according to Taylor. "However, there may have been some ballots cast in those two precincts that did not include the contest," he said.

 Heavy usage crashed the state's voter information website Monday night, preventing voters from looking up their voting location. The state's voter information website, vote.utah.gov, had so many hits on its server Monday night, the site just couldn't handle the traffic.

The Utah lieutenant governor's office said the server received 200,000 hits per second, causing the site to first crash around 8 p.m. That's not 200,000 people, but perhaps just frustrated users clicking multiple times on the site.

IT personnel were trying to fix the problem, and at one point they had it back up and working, but then it crashed again early Tuesday.

"In the past we have had a lot of people on our website. We know this is the one day out of the year that we will get a lot, but the good thing to know is that it is up now, we are watching it, we are monitoring it, we have put some extra hardware behind it; and I think we are in good shape," said state elections director Mark Thomas.

 In Utah County, card encoders not working properly prevented voters from using voting machines.

When the polls opened at 7 a.m., all of the 110 polling locations in Utah County were running into the same problem.