RENO, Nev. (AP) — Officials reported "isolated" primary voting glitches Tuesday involving the state's new touch-screen voting machines in Nevada's two most populous areas, and blamed the system for a technical problem that delayed the count of ballots in one rural northern county.
Registrars in Las Vegas and Reno said a small number of voting machines failed to properly display all candidates' names early in the day, and a state official and a member of The Associated Press election tabulation team said the vote tally was delayed for more than two hours after polls closed in Pershing County.
In no case were voters unable to successfully cast a ballot with help from poll workers, said Jennifer Russell, spokeswoman for the Nevada Secretary of State's office.
The vote Pershing County vote count finally began in Lovelock at about 9:30 p.m., Russell and AP election team member Alicia Craig said.
Officials in Las Vegas and Reno said no vote totals were affected by the temporary glitch with electronic touch-screen voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems, which is based in Denver and Toronto and serves as the vendor for every county jurisdiction in Nevada except Carson City.
Washoe County Registrar of Voters Deanna Spikula said the "voter display" problems affected fewer than 10 voters Tuesday in the Reno-Sparks area.
Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria guessed there were fewer than 20 incidents at the 172 vote centers in and around Las Vegas.
Spikula said the problem was not limited to any particular political party. She said in most cases, the size of the text font was too large for all the names to appear on the screen and a toggle on the touchscreen had to be flipped to shrink the list to screen size.
"It did not affect tabulation," she told reporters at a late afternoon news conference.
Russell said state election officials investigated each report of problems immediately and in each case either reset the affected machine or took it out of service.
"In each instance the voter was able to cast a ballot," she said.
The Reno Gazette-Journal reported that an unrelated technical error caused problems for some people who voted in the first two hours polls were open Tuesday morning.
Voter Greg Rabina told the newspaper he had to try three cards and several machines before his vote went through.
Spikula said those machines malfunctioned because the time programmed on voting cards didn't match the time on voting tablets.