Tulsa County Election Board explains reporting delays

TULSA - Faulty voting machines and a high number of last-minute absentee ballots are to blame for the slow reporting of election results, the Tulsa County Election Board has confirmed.

Assistant Secretary Shelly Boggs tells 2NEWS that several ballots from overseas were faxed to the board late Tuesday.

Once they arrived, election workers had to transfer them to actual ballots, so they could be fed into the voting machines.

The state election board requires that absentee ballots be counted and reported first.

After that, 11 of the county's 250 voting machines had trouble printing the total reports.

Nine of them were fixed, but the ballots from two of them had to be fed into different machines.

"It wasn't a good situation, by any means," Boggs said.

The State Election Board is already looking into the matter.

"I know it's very important to both the state of Oklahoma, to the election board, and to the vendor to make sure that these snafus are worked out," Boggs said.

Tulsa County Commissioner John Smaligo says he and the rest of the commissioners will also examine what changes need to be made.

"I think it's very likely that we will discuss this issue before the next election cycle," he said.

Sixty-six percent of registered Tulsa County voters -- 227,000 -- took to the polls Tuesday.