Porter County’s high-speed ballot counting machine slowed to a crawl Tuesday, forcing election officials and county workers to bring in ballot counting machines and feed ballots by hand until 4 a.m. Wednesday to finish up the task.

“On the day it was supposed to be the star of the show, it wasn’t getting the job done,” Porter County Clerk Jessica Bailey said Wednesday.

By the time the unofficial results were tallied, the results were clear: Republicans won every contested race they were in for county office. Democrat Kevin Breitzke, the county’s longtime surveyor, was unopposed but Democrats lost a seat on the Board of Commissioners and the County Council, strengthening the Republicans’ majority on both boards.

Come January, Republicans will hold all three seats on the Board of Commissioners and five of the seven seats on the County Council.

Turnout was 62.15%, disappointing both Porter County Republican Party Chair Michael Simpson and his Democratic counterpart, Don Craft, who agreed that the high percentage of voters who voted straight Republican, at 56.72% of the ballots tallied, helped push that party’s victories, even though at-large council candidates had to be selected individually.

“I call it the ‘easy button.’ They walked in and clicked R because they were mad,” said Simpson, adding Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ candidate for president running against former President Donald Trump, “unfortunately” took the blame for voters’ wrath.

Public safety and immigration played a part in the voting, Simpson said, as did “the economy, inflation, whatever you want to call it.”

“People were unhappy, they just were, and it just transferred down the ballot,” he said.

Craft said that the turnout wasn’t that far off from what he expected but it was unfortunate that one-third of the county’s registered voters didn’t cast ballots. Simpson said turnout in the 2020 presidential election hovered over 66% so turnout is sliding backwards.

Knocking on doors with candidates, Craft said he ran into folks who said they didn’t have time for politics or thought “both parties are a bunch of crooks,” which he also found unfortunate.

Porter County also has been shifting demographically over the past decade or two as Republicans move to the county from Illinois and south Lake County, Craft said.

“I was hoping for a better Democrat turnout but that didn’t happen,” he said, adding the top ballot races “swayed county races too.”

While voters favored Harris over President Joe Biden, who dropped off the ballot in July just weeks after a disastrous debate performance against Trump, Craft said “I don’t think either of them has the magnetism that Trump does.”

Simpson also credited Bailey and her staff, including Sundae Schoon, the director of Porter County Elections and Registration, assistant director Tara Graf, the election board and everyone else from the county who pitched in all night so the votes would be counted.

The breakdown, Simpson said, was mechanical and “nothing nefarious.”

The high-speed counter was jamming and not taking ballots as it should, Bailey said, adding it was working, but “it was just slow.”

Staff and technicians from the vendor worked to get the counter back up to speed without luck, Bailey said, adding the machine had been cleaned, undergone preventative maintenance and performed flawlessly during the state-required public test of equipment held before early voting began.

“We did everything within our power to get the results and we got them in,” she said.

Porter County Elections and Registration posted a notice on its Facebook page around 10 p.m. that the only ballots that had been counted to that point were the ones cast on Election Day; at that point, around 36,000 ballots had been tallied, according to the county’s election totals web page.

County officials had said that more than 40,000 early ballots were cast through Saturday and those weren’t included in Tuesday night’s totals.

Officials used the vote mobile van to move 17 ballot counters from the Elections and Registration Office at 155 Franklin St. to the Expo Center to count the ballots, Bailey said.

“Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to get the machines,” she said.

The election board will check provisional ballots and certify the election results on Nov. 15.

alavalley@chicagotribune .com