SALT LAKE CITY — Sen. Daniel Thatcher was still seething Wednesday morning about what he witnessed at the polls on election night.

The West Valley City Republican said he stood in line at the Hunter Library polling place for two hours before he could cast his vote. What was worse, he said, was watching people walk away when they saw the line.

"A two-hour wait is crazy," Thatcher said. "That is just gross incompetence."

Because of lower than expected early voting and vote-by-mail return rates, state and local election officials had warned that Election Day polls could see extraordinarily long lines, especially in counties holding by-mail elections.

"But I don't think anyone expected what we actually saw," said Rep. Kim Coleman, R-West Jordan, noting there were two-hour waits at Bingham Creek Library throughout the day.

State Elections Director Mark Thomas said counties throughout the state saw instances of long lines, but Salt Lake County polls were particularly packed, with 37 vote centers to serve the county's more than 510,000 active registered voters.

Some waits extended three to four hours. Salt Lake County Elections Director Rozan Mitchell said polls in Magna and West Valley City processed their last voters right before midnight because voters in line before 8 p.m. weren't turned away.

Because votes were still being processed, Salt Lake County's preliminary election night results weren't posted until after 11 p.m., leaving many high-profile Utah races in limbo for hours after polls closed.

On top of the waits at the polls, Salt Lake County also saw tens of thousands of vote-by-mail ballots flood the post office Monday and Tuesday, as well as thousands more fill county drop boxes in the final hours of election night.

As of Wednesday evening, the county still had more than 153,000 ballots to count, Mitchell said.

That's 30 percent of the county's active registered voters. Once the ballots are processed, those votes will bump the county's turnout to 81 percent.

But Mitchell said it won't be possible to process, verify and tabulate all 153,000 by the next result update scheduled for 3 p.m. Thursday, so several close legislative and local races could remain in limbo until the next batch of results are released Tuesday.

Statewide, more than 228,000 last-minute by-mail or provisional ballots were still uncounted, Thomas said, but that tally only included 10 counties that had reported their numbers to the elections office late Wednesday.

Of those, nearly 44,000 were from Davis County and 16,773 from Weber County, but no county had as many remaining ballots as Salt Lake.

"It's the day after, and we still don't know Salt Lake County's results," Coleman said.

Related:

User submitted: Election Day brings long lines at polling locations

All across Utah today, voters headed out to their polling locations to fill out ballots and cast votes. Voter turnout was high, and several people submitted photos of voters waiting in long lines at their polling locations.

Thatcher said Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen should have planned for more than 37 vote centers — especially more than two in West Valley, Utah's second largest city. He said even though the county held a vote-by-mail election, Swensen should know many people may still want to vote in person.

"Election Day is when people have a constitutional right to go to the polls and cast a ballot. And if you only have two polling locations for 130,000 people, clearly you've done bad math," he said. "At the end of the day, the underlying problem is we have a county clerk that failed to calculate the number of polling locations (needed). That's absolutely unacceptable."

Swensen was not available for comment Wednesday, but Mitchell said county officials realized a week before the election that there may not be enough polling places because of low early voting rates.

County officials said they attempted to secure the Maverik Center in West Valley and the South Towne Expo Center in Sandy as "super-voting" sites.

But state law restricts counties from adding polling places less than 15 days before the election, and the added locations would conflict with a public notice already circulated to voters to inform them about the countywide parks and recreation bond option.

"It was a bit painful for a lot of people," Mitchell acknowledged of the long lines and late-night results.

But she and Thomas said the problems arose due to a variety of unexpected issues, not because of one individual.

Thomas said his office will be meeting with county clerks next week to debrief, but he expects the late results and long lines had a lot to do with a unique presidential election with many undecided voters waiting until the final hours to cast their ballots.

Mitchell said the last-minute jams could have happened because it's the first presidential election Salt Lake County conducted by mail.

"Some of it was growing pains," she said. "We're learning that a lot of our voters aren't used to a vote-by-mail system, but I think voters will realize now that moving forward when they get that ballot in the mail, they need to mail it or drop in off in person."

Thatcher said he's already opened a bill file to set a new standard for by-mail elections and require at least one polling place to be open for a certain amount of registered voters, though he's not sure yet what that standard would be.

Related topics