After the ‘hanging chad’ issues of the 2000 election Boulder County in Colorado changed their balloting system. They decided that the most secure and reliable method would be to go to paper ballots.

This was expected to be a little slower, but Boulder County election officials expected the counts to finish by late-morning on Wednesday. It’s now Thursday and they are still counting.

This morning KOA radio reported that the $1.5 million scanning system couldn’t rotate the images. Staffing also became an issue. From the Boulder Daily Camera:

A lack of staffing and poorly trained election judges appeared to slow the counting process. At about 11 a.m. Wednesday, with fewer than 40 percent of the total vote tabulated, several ballot-scanning machines sat idle as dozens of boxes of ballots waited to be counted.

David Leeds, chairman of the Boulder County Republican Party, said some scanning machines weren’t being used because election officials couldn’t find bipartisan pairs of judges to staff the “resolution committees” that issue verdicts on ballots the new vote-counting machines reject. He said he had Republicans available, but they were twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their Democratic counterparts to show up.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Leeds said. “This is Boulder. You can’t throw a rock without hitting a Democrat.”

County spokesman Jim Burrus said the county had enough bipartisan judges. But officials temporarily had run out of people to staff the third spot on each resolution committee — the computer operator. At some point, he said, volunteers and election workers needed to get some sleep.

“The people who had been working since the wee hours of the morning have gone home, and we’re waiting for their replacements to show up,” he said. “There’s a little gap going on here.”

Several judges at one station who were ready to work stared in frustration at the computer screen, which was demanding a password. One of the judges explained that only three people know that code — two had gone home, and the other was busy.

Meanwhile, two dozen volunteers sat at a table in the middle of the room alphabetizing early-voting election documents. Although officials have to complete that task, it doesn’t assist in the counting process. But Burrus said those volunteers weren’t trained to sit on resolution committees.

And some glitches took large amounts of time. For one batch of about 300 ballots, election judges had to confirm every race on every ballot by hand — a process that took hours.