Ken Palmer

Lansing State Journal

MASON - Election officials in Ingham County were forced to improvise after running short of ballots in Tuesday's elections, officials said.

Municipal clerks were photocopying ballot forms to cope with a shortage caused by an unexpectedly large voter turnout, Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum said early Tuesday evening.

Everyone in line to vote by 8 p.m. was able to cast their ballot, Byrum said. And all votes will be accurately tabulated, even though the photocopied forms will have to be tabulated by hand, she said.

"There is no reason at all for voters to be concerned about not having their votes (correctly tabulated)," Byrum said.

Municipal clerks began expressing concerns about running out of ballots about two hours before polls closed at 8 p.m. and said they were going to start using their surplus absentee voter ballot forms, she said.

If absentee ballots are any indication, Michigan could be headed toward a record turnout in today's presidential primary.

As of earlier Tuesday, nearly 556,000 absentee ballots had been issued: 311,407 Republican ballots and 239,197 Democratic ones. In total, it was 162,000 more than those issued four years ago and, already, it was clear absentee ballots could prove decisive.

In an EPIC/MRA poll done last week for the Detroit Free Press and other media partners, people surveyed who had already voted by absentee leaned heavily toward New York businessman Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And voting on election day also seems to be up, according to some local clerks and the Secretary of State.

"We're seeing high turnout in pockets around the state on both sides of the aisle," said Christopher Thomas, head of elections for the Michigan SOS.

Ingham County was not the only place where clerks ran out of ballots. Shortages also were reported in Redford, a western Detroit suburb, and in one precinct in Kent County. Additional ballots were quickly sent to those precincts, but some voters reported having to wait for more than an hour in line until more ballots were delivered.

Turnout was so high at a Redford Township polling station, Precinct 25, that the station ran out of Democratic ballots for at least half an hour, an organizer said.

Ingham County's old tabulators can't read ballots printed on regular copy paper, so officials will have to tabulate those votes by hand, Byrum said.

That will slow the tabulation process by around two hours, meaning the county may not have final results until 2 a.m. Wednesday, she said.

Byrum said she believed the shortage was with ballots for those voting Democrat, but said it was not yet clear whether there were shortages of Republican ballots as well. In any case, she said voter turnout was significantly higher than expected.

Ballot forms were ordered in early January, and a second order was placed in mid-February after some clerks noticed a higher-than-expected number of absentee ballot requests, Byrum said.

Less than 20 minutes after the polls closed in Eaton County Tuesday night, Clerk Diana Bosworth said election workers from polling locations around the county had reported steady turnout all day.

No solid voter turnout numbers were available yet, she said.

But none of those sites ran out of ballots, Bosworth said, even though election officials in other counties around the state thought that was a real possibility.

"I understand it's been a worry across the state," she said.

A person who answered the phone at the Clinton County clerk's office said there were not ballot shortages Tuesday.

Kathleen Gray of the Detroit Free Press and State Journal reporter Rachel Greco contributed to this report.