Record numbers of absentee voters and late registrations slowed vote counting in Flathead County on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Final vote tallies were released around noon on Wednesday.

Early voting took root in the Flathead in a big way for the 2008 presidential election, with close to 20,000 absentee ballots issued. The number of absentee ballot requests surged in this election cycle to 25,922. Of those, roughly 24,000 were returned to the county election department.

The county also processed 1,028 late voter registrations, up more than 200 from last-day registrations in 2008.

Total voter turnout was 70.68 percent. A total of 43,151 ballots were cast; Flathead County has 61,052 registered voters.

“With the way the laws are for same-day registration and more people taking advantage of that, naturally we’re not going to be over [with the counting] by 8 o’clock,” Election Services Manager Monica Eisenzimer said Wednesday, noting that all of Montana’s larger counties had similar long lines and longer-than-usual vote counting processes.

A malfunction of one of Flathead County’s two vote-counting machines also slowed the process. Election officials tried to fix the problem with a phone call from a repair technician, but when that didn’t work the repairman had to travel from Bozeman to Kalispell and arrived late in the evening.

The machine snafu meant election tabulators had to reprocess some 9,000 ballots that had been counted prior to discovering an issue with the machine’s calibration.

“The three-page ballot slowed us down a ton,” Eisenzimer said.

And, she added, the counting  attomachines stop for each write-in vote and over and under votes in which voters either marked too many ovals or didn’t vote for some candidates.

Absentee ballots present an added challenge for election officials because sometimes they sit on kitchen tables, getting splashed with food or drink. Some are returned rather rumpled. All of those factors can slow down the process, she said.

Eisenzimer said her department also saw an increase in voter registration problems linked to the registrations conducted through the Montana Department of Motor Vehicles. People can register to vote when they renew their driver’s license, but sometimes those registrations fall through the cracks and don’t show up on the appropriate poll rosters, she said.

“We have no way to know until Election Day” how many problems that’s caused, Eisenzimer said.

Election Administrator Paula Robinson said Secretary of State Linda McCulloch has worked with DMV offices to help them better facilitate those voter registrations, but it’s remained a problem.

Robinson pointed out that the Secretary of State’s office also has worked with the U.S. Postal Service in making arrangements to get all of the mailed-in absentee ballots.

The Kalispell Post Office allowed election officials to do a final collection of about 60 absentee ballots at 7:45 p.m. Tuesday to meet the poll-closing deadline.

“This post office has been so good to us,” Robinson said.

Tuesday’s mild weather made standing in long lines at the fairgrounds rather pleasant, despite wait times of more than three hours at times. The line snaked down the food-court area of the fairgrounds even after polls closed at 8 p.m., but the crowd remained good-natured.

The very last person in line, Shontae Sullivan, 19, was voting for the first time. She said she had no good reason for waiting until the 11th hour to register.

“I’m a procrastinator,” she said.

The election Resolution Board met Wednesday afternoon to review about 230 military ballots that had been processed on Tuesday. Resolution Board member Steve Elm said it took six hours to process military ballots because the mailed-in ballots had to be duplicated onto official county ballots and verified by an official from each political party.

A number of provisional ballots — those ballots in which there are questions about a given voter’s eligibility — wasn’t yet available from the election office. Those ballots will be reviewed and counted next week.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.