HASTINGS, Mich. (WOOD) — For Barry County Clerk Pam Palmer, Election Day and the day after have run together.
She hasn't slept since Tuesday morning.
"I'm thinking, this is gonna be a really late night," Palmer recalled thinking around midnight Wednesday.
That was when the trouble began. Township clerks had started bringing cards that hold election data to Hastings to be entered into the computer and processed.
"The first few came in and the results were fine. It was uploading perfectly. And then it got to where some would upload, and some would not," Palmer said.
She called the programmer to troubleshoot, but it didn't help. So, she and her colleagues had to tally up the votes the long way.
"I would say two-thirds of my precincts had to be manually uploaded," Palmer said.
That meant individually counting thousands of votes, something that took all night and into the next day.