UPDATE: Ballot counting resumes in San Bernardino County after four-hour delay

By SHARON McNARY / The Press-Enterprise

SAN BERNARDINO - Election results in San Bernardino County were stalled Tuesday night when the county's new electronic voting system took longer than expected to begin providing results.

After running the results of absentee ballots, nearly 4 1/2 hours passed without any more ballots being counted. Registrar of Voters Scott Konopasek blamed the problem on lack of experience with the new system.

"It's a learning curve," he said.

The absentee results were reported at 8:22 p.m. The next results didn't arrive until 12:45 a.m., with a total of 14.5% of precincts reporting countywide.

During test runs of the computer counting logic, using a small sample, the process of telling the computer which machines and ballot types were valid went quickly, he said. But he underestimated the time it would take for the computer to validate the combinations of 4,000 voting machines and 10,000 different ballot types possible within the county.

Konopasek said he started the process, called initialization, at 8:30 p.m. and by 10:30 p.m. the process was still cranking away with no ballots having been counted yet.

"Nothing's broken, nothing's malfunctioning, nothing's lost and nothing's being hidden. We just should have done this at 4 p.m.," he said.

The electronic voting system was introduced in January during a Highland recall election, and both voting and counting went smoothly. But the number of votes to be counted was much smaller.

In November 2001, the failure of Registrar of Voters managers to fully perform logic testing on the computer coding for the ballot counting machines resulted in votes for some candidates to go to other candidates. All 82 elections were subjected to a hand recount, with the results in 13 local water and school board races overturned. Registrar Ingrid Gonzales resigned months later.

Konopasek, her replacement, had pioneered the use of electronic voting machines by the same company, Sequoia Voting Systems in Snohomish County, Wash.