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The several dozen poll workers counting ballots in a rented warehouse at 2 a.m. today might have felt otherwise, but Bernalillo County Clerk Mary Herrera said the inaugural run of paper ballot voting in the county went well.

"It's been very fun, very challenging and very different," Herrera said.

It was not, however, very smooth.

Two precincts temporarily ran out of ballots Tuesday morning and 25 others ran short after they received far fewer copies than they should have.

"The Secretary of State's Office sent the ballots, and I can't speak to why there weren't enough," said Herrera, who in other news was elected secretary of state Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Secretary of State's Office said Tuesday that the County Clerk's Office should have checked the ballot delivery to ensure the proper number were in hand for each precinct.

Precincts 57, on the West Side, and 603, in the Northeast Heights, ran out of ballots. Both are areas considered strongholds of U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, a Republican running against Democratic Attorney General Patricia Madrid.

Wilson and other Republicans denounced what they called a deliberate effort to disenfranchise Republican voters. With Wilson clinging to a slim lead today, that may become something of a moot point.

Precincts 57 and 603 have about 2,000 registered voters each but initially received only 150 ballots after a zero was left off the ballot order, the Secretary of State's Office said.

Precinct 603, at the Church of the Good Shepherd, 7834 Tennyson St. N.E., ran out of ballots just before 9 a.m. County Elections Director Jaime Diaz acknowledged that federal law may have been violated when an unknown number of voters there were turned away rather than given provisional ballots.

Herrera said additional ballots were printed for those two precincts and they did not run out of ballots again. Precinct 603 was restocked by about 10 a.m.

Extra voting booths were also set up at several busy polling places in an effort to cut down on lines.

An effort was made to set up extra booths at Precinct 57, at the Painted Sky Elementary School on Gavin Drive N.W., but the precinct judge there refused to allow the extra booths, Herrera said.

"There were more than 200 people in line at that point," she said.

Most Bernalillo County precincts reported results by 11 p.m. Results from the final precincts in the East Mountains arrived about 12:30 a.m. today after a poll worker bringing the results to county headquarters suffered a flat tire.

"This was actually a lot quicker than what we've had in past years," Herrera said.

Still, poll workers remained at a warehouse off Monta¤o Road Northeast into the early morning today, hand-counting absentee and early ballots that were rejected by ballot-counting machines.

Diaz hoped those counts would be completed by 5 a.m. but acknowledged that poll workers were struggling against their own internal clocks. Dozens of workers had to leave their posts to sleep.

The hand tallies may not decide the hotly contested race between Wilson and Madrid.

County officials said 2,698 provisional ballots and 1,058 "in lieu of" ballots - the latter used by absentee voters who claimed they never got a ballot in the mail - were cast Tuesday.

Those ballots won't be counted until canvassing begins Thursday or Friday, and the results may not be known until Monday or Tuesday, Diaz said.