As Gov. Mike Pence was congratulating the Republican state candidates on their wins, candidates in Hamilton County still were awaiting first word of their race results. A technical issue with the tallying machine left approximately two dozen people gathered at the Hamilton County Judicial Center waiting for hours on election night.

The 6,307 absentee ballots were the first results announced at 9:14 p.m. with final results being released at 10:53 p.m. – almost five hours after polls closed on Nov. 4.

“I am concerned,” Hamilton County Democrat Party Chairman Keith Clock said he and others waited for word on the results.

The issues were frustrating to Clock who said he has become accustomed to election night delays.

“It seems like we are the last ones to report. Tonight (Nov. 4) was no exception,” he said. “But tonight we had glitch after glitch. I’m still walking away not 100 percent sure what happened.”

Clock said his issues involved a new Microvote employee retallying votes independently without the absentee board present and card readers going out.

“Technicians are tallying numbers in the basement,” he said. “All I can do is sit there and be upset about it.

Clock said he questions the results.

“I don’t have faith in them,” he said. “I don’t have faith in the process right now.”

Hamilton County Election Administrator Kathy Richardson said Clock signed off on the results, making them official.

“He had the ability to go downstairs with them. I’m not sure why he’s so upset,” she said. “There was not a glitch in the system. The absentee numbers matched the report.”

Richardson said Microvote took the voting machines used for absentee/early voting and tallied them out earlier on Election Day. She said the eight machines, which contain all 217 ballots on them, take approximately 20 minutes each to tally. In comparison, precinct machines maybe have three ballots.

“We started late on counting absentee cards that go through the scanner,” Richardson said, adding cards were finished after 7:30 p.m. inside the Judicial Center. “One card had an error and it cleared out the absentees. It cleared out all that work he’d done in the morning.”

While all precincts were in by 8 p.m., the process had to be restarted and because of the way the system is setup the absentee ballots needed to be run before the more than 500 precinct machines. Adding to the difficulties was one tallying machine stopped working.

“We had 500 cards to run through one machine,” Richardson said. “Having to redo absentee (ballots) put us back a couple hours.”