Residents were anxious in Lacombe awaiting election results last night that elections staff had hoped to have together much earlier in the night with the electronic voting system.

There was word there was some problems with ballot balancing, but that wasn't the case according to Returning Officer Dion Pollard.

“The machines worked well, the counting went well, the workers did a phenomenal job, our Deputy Returning Officers did an excellent job at getting people through in as quick of a time as we could. The number of people wasn’t a whole bunch more than previous years, it was just the timing people came was different from previous years.”

Those results were not shared until 10pm, much later than expected by elections staff, who had planned to have them up within the hour of the polls closing.

Pollard says voter numbers spiked in the last hour of the night, with people still coming in the door at 8 o’clock.

“I think with just the sheer numbers of people coming at the end of the night, our experience in elections in the past is, generally past 7 o’clock it slows down. That was not the case last night, so much so that there were still people in through the door at 8 o’clock, and of course anybody in through the door before 8 is permitted to vote, so it just backed everything up is what it did.”

The backup resulted in delays in some of the checks and balances of the voting process.

There was a 34% voter turnout in Lacombe, down slightly percentage wise than the 37% in 2013, but Pollard says more voters did turnout, the lower percentage is attributed to the calculation of eligible voters from census numbers.

 Otherwise Pollard says the machines did what they were supposed to, they double checked the numbers and he commended elections staff for their work throughout the day, keeping line-ups moving.