BELFAST - At the close of polls on Election Night, workers at the city's three polling places printed out tallies from the optical ballot readers, posting those unofficial results for the benefit of those keeping a close eye on local races. Several days later, however, the city had yet to release official results. 

So why did it take so long?

The issue was not one of "hanging chads," but it did involve odd voting machine behavior in which ballots were apparently read but then dropped in a pile of ballots rejected either because they contained write-in votes or otherwise couldn't be read. City Clerk Denise Beckett said there have always been write-ins (including a few "Mickey Mouses and Hugh Hefners," she said, referring to the inevitable nose-thumbing non-votes) and these have always had to be hand-counted.

The problem, Beckett later learned, was something termed a "diverter error." The ballots had been read, but were put aside as though they hadn't.

The problem was more pronounced on a dedicated machine the city used to process absentee ballots, and Beckett had heard from a voting machine technician that it might have something to do with the folds in these ballots, which were mailed to absentee voters.

To demonstrate, she took a sample ballot from among the reams of election related materials in her office and folded it the way she and other city officials had folded more than 1,000 ballots for absentee voters prior to election day.

When she opened it up, she pointed to where the folds crossed through the names of candidates.

"See where that crease is? It's right in Charlie," she said, pointing to the oval next to the name of Republican Senate candidate Charles Summers.

Beckett said both she and state officials were confident that the folded ballots were counted before they were erroneously diverted along with other ballots that the optical scanners couldn't read and the final results seem to have borne this theory out.

Overall the number of rejected ballots wasn't significant enough to change the outcome of any race, but Beckett said the discrepancies meant things didn't add up on the state-mandated reporting forms.

"They say we should be dealing with three or four [rejected ballots], not 12 or 20," she said.

By Thursday morning the problem was still unresolved, which was when, according to City Treasurer Rickie LeSan, the Secretary of State's office told the Belfast officials seal the boxes holding unresolved ballots and await help.

The next day, Beckett, Lesan and company got permission to break the seals on the ballots in question and were able to work through the problem with guidance over the phone from the Secretary of State's office and submit the results just before the deadline, Beckett said. As expected, the totals barely budged.

In the end, Beckett said she has not received a definitive answer from the state as to where things went wrong. It may have been the folded ballots, human error or some combination of factors that held up the official results from Belfast, she said.

What she does know is that she and her staff were overwhelmed on Election Day. The voter turnout of 3,633 out of 4,912 previously registered voters was very high, she said. Additionally, 250 people registered to vote on Election Day. Another 50 filled out change of address forms at the polls. Considering these factors and the added pressure of a presidential election, Beckett said Election Night fatigue may have been as much a factor as anything.

"It could be tired eyes, old ladies, me and long hours," she said. "You add everything into that equation and we're only human."

Penobscot Bay Pilot reporter Ethan Andrews can be reached at ethanandrews@penbaypilot.com