Considering the number of races and voters in Tuesday’s general election, it’s disappointing that it was after midnight before the Douglas County Clerk’s office could announce final unofficial vote totals to the public.

In analyzing the situation after the count, Jamie Shew, who took over in January as the county clerk, said technology was the problem. Douglas County’s vote-counting technology simply hasn’t kept up with its population, he said, and improvements need to be made.

He’s almost certainly right, but before jumping into expensive vote-counting upgrades, county officials should look closely at a variety of factors that are scheduled to drastically change the face of Kansas elections within the next two years. Shifting from the county’s system of counting all ballots in two centralized voting scanners to a system that places scanners at individual polls would provide for a quicker count, but is it the best long-term plan for the county?

The federal Help America Vote Act will require every polling place in the nation to have touch-screen voting machines by November 2006. Does it make sense to invest in precinct-based vote scanners, or will that technology be quickly outdated by a subsequent switch to touch-screen voting machines?

Shew noted that one of the vote-counting machines being used on Tuesday was “cantankerous” and had to be operated slowly. After several local vote-counting glitches in recent years, residents probably agree with his assessment that it was more important to produce reliable vote numbers than to rush the vote-counting process.

Still, Douglas County should be able to do better than dragging the vote count from a relatively small local election into the wee hours of the next morning.

Faced with the county’s growth and the looming federal mandate for new voting technology, it seems likely the county won’t be able to avoid upgrading its election system — and that upgrade probably won’t be inexpensive. To make sure they are making the best possible use of taxpayers dollars, county election officials and county commissioners should carefully study the implications of any new election technology to try to ensure it will be a good long-term investment for the county while also providing election results that are both accurate and more timely than what they are producing now.