Counting ballots for Tuesday’s local election in Douglas County went into the early hours of Wednesday morning.

While other counties completed vote counts by 9:30 p.m., it took until about 12:30 a.m. for ballots to be counted for all precincts here. That left some people wondering why it took so long for Douglas County to complete its count. The question wasn’t a surprise to Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew.

“I believe we did everything we could with the technology we had,” he said. “I realize it may not be as fast as some people wanted. But I wanted the confidence that our reports were correct.”

Douglas County uses centralized voting scanners to tabulate results. That means all the ballots in the county must be returned to the courthouse to go through one of two scanners.

Shew, who campaigned for office promising to make elections run more efficiently, said he would like to improve the county’s voting technology for upcoming elections. The number of registered voters has increased over the years, and now stands at 66,926 in the county.

“Basically, we need our technology to catch up with our voting population,” Shew said.

County Commissioners Bob Johnson and Jere McElhaney said they weren’t concerned with the speed of ballot counting. They are more concerned about getting accurate vote counts, they said.

“I was in bed by 9 p.m.,” McElhaney said. “So, I didn’t find out the results until the next day and I feel confident that our county clerk gave us accurate results.”

Nonetheless, the county will have to make some changes in voting technology because of the 2002 federal Help America Vote Act. Requirements of the act must be met by 2006.

Election workers, from left, Jackie Hout, Yvonne Rapp and Maureen Wustefeld feed ballots into a vibrating machine, which aids in separating the ballots before being fed into a ballot scanner. Election results were slow to be counted on Tuesday at the Douglas County Courthouse.

It also means substantial spending will be required of the county.

“My guess is that we’re going to be driven by the federal regulations,” Johnson said.

The act requires every polling site have at least one voting machine designed specifically for the disabled. There also must be another machine on site to alert voters if they improperly filled out the ballot.

Other counties set up ballot scanners at polling sites instead of in one central location as is done in Douglas County. Johnson County uses an electronic touchscreen and Sedgwick County has electronic push-button voting machines.

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The time it takes to tabulate voting results is cut down substantially with the use of those machines, Shew said. But they also cost money.

Precinct scanners, for example, cost $5,000 to $7,000. Multiply that by the county’s 67 precincts and it would mean that up to $469,000 must be spent for the purchase of the machines and software.

Shew said he planned to meet with Douglas County commissioners about improving voting machines and continuing to review costs associated with improvements.