John Beale, Post-Gazette

Tracy Beare votes using a paper provisional ballot at the College Hill Church of The Nazarene polling place yesterday in Beaver Falls. For the first three hours of voting, only one of the three new electronic voting machines at the poll was working. After some voters left before casting their votes, a court order was made to keep the poll open an extra hour until 9 p.m. Since the voting machines automatically shut down at 8 p.m., the provisional ballots had to be used. Ms. Beare was voting shortly after 8 p.m. Where to find final unofficial election results Allegheny County Butler County Westmoreland County Lawrence County Mercer County Beaver County

The introduction yesterday of electronic touch-screen voting machines for the primary election hit a few bumps in the road, but, overall, proceeded with fewer problems than anticipated in Allegheny and surrounding counties.

The main problem was the failure by poll workers to obtain a printed "zero-vote" count from the machines before the polls opened at 7 a.m. The zero-vote count is necessary to serve as a baseline and ensure no votes are stored on the machines before official voting begins.

Most of the 600 calls for help from poll workers in Allegheny County concerned the zero-vote count problem, county Chief Executive Dan Onorato said.

More than 120 zero-vote count problems were reported in the 2,638 Electronic Systems & Software, or ES&S, machines across Allegheny County. Some of the machines were not fixed for several hours, which forced voters to use paper ballots, but nearly all of the problems were solved by mid-afternoon. Mr. Onorato said no one missed the opportunity to vote as a result of the missteps.

Dozens of other problems with the zero-vote counts were reported in in Beaver, Butler, Indiana, Lawrence, Mercer, Washington and Westmoreland counties as well. Washington County voters used Accu Vote-TSX electronic voting machines from Diebold Inc., while voters in the other counties used the ES&S machines.

ES&S, based in Omaha, Neb., had 35 technicians and other workers in Western Pennsylvania, including 10 in Allegheny County, company spokesman Ken Fields said.

There were also other glitches with the machines, including nine that arrived at polling places with cracked screens. Those machines were replaced from a pool of 50 that had been held in reserve for that purpose, Mr. Onorato said.

Though some machines froze temporarily, no major software errors occurred in the ES&S machines in Allegheny and surrounding counties.

"Things were even better than I thought they'd be," said Regis Young, director of Butler County's elections bureau.

The screens locked up on a few of the ES&S machines in Butler County, but the 16 county workers sent out as troubleshooters to the 82 precincts solved the problems, Mr. Young said.

"We just had to do a reset on the machine and it was fine. No votes were lost," he said.

Five polling places in Beaver County, bordering Ohio, were ordered to stay open an hour later than scheduled because they had not opened on time.

Some problems at the polls were the result of human error.

One voter at Burchfield Elementary School in Shaler caused a problem when he used a pen to write the names of write-in candidates on the screen of the ES&S electronic voting machine. The proper way to vote for write-in candidates is through the use of a keyboard that appears on the screen when the write-in option is selected.

Voters at a Penn Hills precinct, including U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum and his wife, Karen, were forced to wait about 90 minutes before they could vote because the judge of elections was without a ride to the polling place at Forbes Elementary School on Saltsburg Road.

Mr. Santorum's right to vote in Penn Hills was challenged by a man who contends the Santorums live in Virginia and not Penn Hills.

Ed Vecchio told the judge of elections, Lisa Moore, and the constable, Vi Scarinji, before the Santorums entered the polling place he planned to challenge their residency. But the poll workers did not ask the Santorums to complete an affidavit attesting to their residency, which is part of the challenge process, so the Santorums were able to vote, Mr. Vecchio said.

It was Mr. Vecchio's wife, Erin, a Penn Hills school board member, who first brought the issue of Mr. Santorum's residency before the board two years ago over payments made for the Santorum children to attend a charter school.

Mr. Vecchio said he plans to send a letter today to the county Board of Elections about the incident.

Mr. Santorum's campaign spokeswoman blamed the residency challenge on state Treasurer Bob Casey Jr., who was a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the senatorial race.

"It's a sad day, but frankly not a surprise, that a surrogate of Bobby Casey Jr. would stoop to a new low and attempt to block Rick and Karen Santorum from taking part in today's election," said Virginia Davis, press secretary for Mr. Santorum's re-election campaign.

Last night, on the North Side, county officials reported no major problems with tabulating votes from the machines or counting at least several thousand paper ballots from various precincts.

"For the first time out, given the compressed schedule we had, I would say it's successful," county Manager Jim Flynn said as midnight approached.

Mr. Flynn said one polling place was missing two ballot boxes, but that overall "the things that are happening are not any different than any other election."

The counting did take longer, however, as workers methodically unloaded from trucks, stacked, and opened hundreds and hundreds of white boxes containing cartridge-like devices holding votes from each machine, plus paper and absentee ballots.

County officials expected to have all votes counted by 2 a.m. today. In the past, unofficial totals usually were available by midnight.

Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who tests voting machines for the state, said he was amazed by how smoothly the counting went.

"[It's] better than anybody could have hoped for for a first outing," said Shamos, who was invited to watch the vote counting.

Voters in 37 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties, including Allegheny, used the ES&S machines, marking the first time county voters had changed machines in 38 years. The Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002 after the disputed results of the 2000 presidential election, requires all states to obtain electronic machines in an attempt to apply uniformity to the election process.

The county had more than 2,600 ES&S iVotronic machines at 1,314 precincts. The number of machines will double for the general election in November and voters will no longer have the option to use paper ballots.

The paper ballots used yesterday at locations where the electronic machines were out of commission were tallied last night by six optical scanners that can count 8,000 votes an hour.

Of the machines in use yesterday in Allegheny County, 10 percent to 12 percent of them experienced problems with zero-vote counts, cracked screens and other issues.

Most polling places had no problems.

In the social hall of Madonna of Jerusalem Church in Sharpsburg, workers had their system running like a well-oiled machine. Judge of Elections Roxane Magnelli and other poll workers arrived before 6 a.m. to set up the iVotronic machines and were ready in plenty of time before the first voter arrived at 7 a.m."We just took our time, went through the instruction sheets and it all came back to us," Ms. Magnelli said.

The six precincts voting inside Burchfield Elementary School, one of the busiest polling places in Shaler, presented a study in contrasts in the operation of the iVotronic machines.

Voters in half the precincts had no problems from 7 a.m. onward, while voters in three other precincts set up across the school's gymnasium were forced to use paper ballots for at least part of the morning. Voters in the 3rd Ward of District 2 used paper ballots until after 11 a.m.

Some voters were unhappy they had to use paper ballots and told poll workers they were not confident the paper ballots would be counted. Voters filled out the paper ballots behind a cardboard screen, then gave the completed ballots to a poll worker, who deposited them in a cardboard box.

"One guy filled out the ballot, then ripped it in half and threw it away," said Mary Jane Macieski, judge of elections for Shaler's 3rd Ward, District 1. "He told us he was disgusted."

County officials and an ES&S spokesman blamed training issues and anxiousness for the problems with the zero-vote counts. Poll workers who underwent training the past few weeks seemed to forget what they had learned once at the polling place, said Mr. Fields.

"I think it was more nerves than anything else," county Manager Flynn said.