Why did vote counting take so long? Officials point to a ‘perfect storm’
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POCATELLO — The 2026 midterm elections have come to a close, and Idaho saw a “huge increase overall” in voters — both on election day and in early and absentee voting.
And while there are no issues with the final count, some counties experienced unexpected difficulties that caused the counting process to stretch into the morning on Wednesday. One of these was Bannock County, where the count lasted until around 8 a.m.
“I will tell you right now that it was absolutely the perfect storm,” said Bannock County Elections Director Julie Hancock.
Over the course of three weeks of early voting, and up until polls closed on election day, 290,507 people cast their votes early and by absentee ballot across the state. In comparison to 2022, when 190,000 voters did the same, that’s a 52.6% increase.
Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane was particularly impressed with these early and absentee voting numbers.
“Really noteworthy was the increased turnout we saw in (the) absentee and in-person early vote. We had over 290,000 Idahoans vote prior to election day, so that really stands out,” McGrane told EastIdahoNews.com the day after the election.
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This was made up of 145,556 people early voting, and 144,951 absentee ballots received, which came out to a 94% return rate, according to the official website of the Secretary of State’s office.
In total, McGrane said 731,000 ballots were cast in Idaho, which comes out to 69% of Idaho’s total electorate prior to election day. This is an increase of 22% from 2022, which saw 599,000 people vote.
This high number of voters was one of the factors that Hancock said led to the perfect storm. Another factor, Hancock said, was that it was a two page ballot, effectively doubling the amount of ballots election staff had to process.
“We have this extraordinary amount of ballots to count. Twenty-thousand people voted on Election Day (in Bannock County). We counted 40,000 ballots,” Hancock said.
And then on top of that, technical difficulties with the machines used to scan the ballots caused delays.
One of these issues was that the tabulator’s rollers were set too tight, causing the machines to jam. In order to resolve this problem, an IT staffer had to get on the phone with a company called Election Systems & Software, which walked them through fixing the problem.
And a completely separate issue was feeding the absentee ballots through the machine.
“Our absentees were a two-page ballot inside an envelope, and the machine just didn’t like the way they were folded,” Hancock said.
Hancock emphasized that the problem wasn’t how the machines tabulated ballots, but with physically feeding them into the scanner.
In order to resolve these ballots that couldn’t go through the scanner, they went to a resolution table made up of a balance of Republican and Democratic volunteers.
“It kicked out so many that we had stacks and stacks and hundreds and hundreds of ballots to resolve that night, which takes a long time,” Hancock said.
As these issues were compounding, Hancock informed elections staff that it would be a long night.
“I kept telling them, ‘We’re going to be here until the sun comes up,’ and we absolutely were,” Hancock said.
But Hancock and the rest of the elections staff, as well as the volunteers, stayed until the job was done.
“We absolutely wouldn’t just shut the lights off and say, ‘Well, let’s finish this up in the morning because we’re tired.’ That doesn’t happen in the elections world,” Hancock said.