Carbon County saw its highest voter participation in more than a decade during Tuesday’s general election, between mail-in and in-person voting.

On Wednesday, county election officials began counting the 9,000-plus mail-in, absentee and military ballots it has received. About 10 percent were counted as of 2:30 p.m.

Counting was set to continue until 8 p.m. before resuming Thursday morning.

“We will be bringing extra people tomorrow to speed the process up. We want to make sure we get the right people who are meticulous, double checking everything as we go. We spent the whole day yesterday from 7 o’clock in the morning, and we were here until after 10:30 last night,” commissioner Wayne Nothstein said during a press conference Wednesday afternoon. “It is a very time consuming process.”

23,653 Carbon County residents cast ballots at the polls on Tuesday. Combined with the mail ballots received - turnout was about 70 percent. Some polling places ran out of ballots, but Commissioner Chris Luaksevich said there were backup plans in place. They included backup ballots at the voter registration office, provisional ballots and ADA-accessible touch screens.

“It’s not that there wasn’t a conscientious effort to be prepared,” Lukasevich said.

The county was eventually able to restock polling places with ballots that were held in reserve at the voter registration office. At one point a vehicle delivering ballots got a flat tire.

While dealing with the issues at the polling places, workers in the elections office were also pre canvassing the mail-in, absentee and military ballots received prior to 8 p.m. -- 9,223 in all.

Tuesday night, they received all the polling materials from the polling places.

Lukasevich said that despite rumors, ballots marked with a marker were counted -- and no ballots scanned at polling places were rejected. .

“The rumor that’s going around that you should be using a pen and not a sharpie is incorrect,” Lukasevich said.

On Wednesday, the voter registration office started actually scanning and counting mail-in ballots. First, they counted the traditional absentee, military, and provisionals from polling places which ran out of ballots.

As of 4 p.m. Tuesday, the county had counted 527 of the 7,744 mail-in ballots received before polls closed.

Dart said that about two-thirds of the ballots have yet to be removed from the outer envelope and secrecy envelope.

They plan to begin counting again Thursday morning, continuing through 8 p.m. Nothstein said it is possible that they will release some results at 4 p.m.

The county is currently required to accept ballots up until Friday at 5 p.m., as long as they were postmarked Nov. 3. However pending court cases could affect those ballots. Dart said that there were only 16 ballots in that category as of Wednesday morning.

The county closed the dropbox at the election office at 8 p.m. Tuesday.

About 2,000 people turned in mail-in ballots at the polls. 623 had to fill out provisional ballots because they had completed their mail-in ballot. Those provisionals have yet to be verified and counted.

“A terrific amount of manpower has been put into this process for two months already when we started getting applications for mail in ballots. We’ve been working diligently, the staff in the election office,” Nothstein said.