Utah County's first experience with electronic voting appears to have gone smoothly, with only minor glitches and delays and no major equipment failures reported.

Nothing is perfect, however. The county elections office plans to adjust some of its procedures for the November general election in an effort to address some snags that surfaced in ballot processing, and state officials plan to introduce auditing requirements as an additional check of election results.

At the polling locations, problems with the new Diebold AccuVote TSx machines included paper jams on the printers that make a copy of a voter's ballot. And in some cases, a voter would touch the computer chip on the access cards used to call up a ballot on the machines, and the card would have to be cleaned up before it could be used.

"They were so minor," said county elections coordinator Sandy Hoffmann. "There was no smoke coming out of the machines. It was all fixable."

Two precincts reported to the Utah County administration building at 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, a half hour after the polls closed and the earliest Hoffmann remembers poll workers arriving.

Out of 117 polling locations from Tuesday's primary, only three need to be "researched," she said -- that is, checked to ensure the number of votes recorded matches the number of voters who showed up. That's an unusually low number, Hoffmann said: "I'm pretty happy."

So is Kim Jackson, Utah County's clerk/auditor.

"We finished a little after 11 (p.m.), where in past elections we're usually there processing ballots well past midnight," he said.

The processing of the memory cards that store votes became "a little bit" clogged when workers from several precincts arrived all at once, Jackson said.

"We had three people that were uploading the cards. It probably would've gone a little faster if we had six people doing that instead of three," he said. "For the general (election), we're going to have a few more people doing that."

Unofficial tallies show that 33,506 ballots were cast Tuesday, representing 17 percent of Utah County's 195,499 registered voters.

In related news, election workers probably will have to go through another step when certifying the vote in November. Some states that use electronic voting include a random audit procedure to check the electronically recorded votes against the paper trail.

Utah doesn't have that requirement, but Lt. Gov. Gary Herbert plans to implement one by the November elections, said spokesman Joe Demma.

The lieutenant governor's office will seek expert advice on the matter this summer and add the requirement administratively, he said.

"We could just randomly take 10 or 15 machines and audit the paper trail, but what we want are professional guidelines," Demma said. "We're going to look for professionals to set some guidelines for what would qualify as an accurate statistical model."

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that while 26 states require paper records of votes, fewer than half of those require regular audits.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A1.