SARASOTA COUNTY — Optical scanners broke down at three precincts this morning, meaning some votes had to be put into locked bins to be counted at the end of the day, election officials said.

“We had to swap out the scanners,” Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent said. “There’s a separate bin on the side for ballots that are not scanned.”

Those ballots will be run through the scanners at the end of the night, Dent said. Poll workers representing both political parties must reconcile the number of ballots given to voters with the number tallied by the scanning machines.

Voters generally said they were confident their votes were counted, but one man said his ballot was rejected four times before pollworkers put it in the slot on the side to be counted later.

He wrote an e-mail to Dent saying he left “the polling center concerned, disappointed, and questioning the integrity of the election results.”

Other than the three broken machines, the first try for the county’s new optical scan voting system is going “just as we expected,” Dent said.

That includes jittery poll workers and some minor issues related to doing something new.

For example, several precincts called the supervisor of elections office to report the scanners were not accepting ballots, only to learn they forgot to remove a security bar in the machine.

Those problems were fixed almost immediately, Dent said.

The final hurdle tonight will be when the 156 scanning machine send in each precinct’s results over telephone lines.

If it all goes well with that reporting, results could be in sooner than previous years, about 8:30 p.m., Dent said.

If not, pollworkers would have to drive the machines to a supervisor of elections office to be counted.

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