Long night, many ballots

County Clerk Dan English was buzzing around inside the heavily secured Kootenai County Election headquarters but took a few moments to come to the door to speak with The Press about the late results.

Just five minutes earlier - at 10:37 p.m. - workers had posted the first results, about 13,000 absentee ballots.

"We said way early on that it's going to be a long, long night because of the write-ins, so it slowed everything down," English said. "Probably about every half hour or so now, we'll have updates from the precincts."

English had warned people that the process would be particularly slow because every time a write-in ballot is "seen" by a ballot-counting machine, the machine shuts down. At that point the ballot is examined by at least two elections officials, who then determine who the write-in vote is for.

"No hitches other than the pure scope of it, and some of the stuff that we might have gotten done a little earlier had to wait until we got done with the write-in process," English said.

For the latest Kootenai County election results, go to cdapress.com.