A final tally of votes in Hillsborough County may not be finished until sometime tomorrow, says canvassing board member Judge James Dominguez. Technical difficulties stopped the counting of votes early this morning with tens of thousands of ballots cast during early voting still not tabulated.

About 12:30 p.m. today, the vote counting began again. Dominguez said the task will start with counting about 6,000 absentee ballots cast Tuesday.

After that, votes cast at two polling sites -- New Mount Zion Baptist Church and Temple Terrace Presbyterian Church, where scanning machines failed -- will be recounted.

Finally, elections officials will try to retrieve about 46,000 early votes that couldn't be tallied on Election Day because of technical difficulties with a system purchased from Premier Election Solutions. Dominguez said officials with Premier are trying to figure out how to debug the system.

"If we can't get the votes out of the machines, all of the ballots will have to be rerun," he said. Dominguez predicted the count would last until Wednesday.

Janet Zink, Times Staff Writer

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