now this is just ridiculous...

the indy star reports:

A programming mistake in Marion County voting machines has slowed the collection of results to a crawl, election officials say.

The machines have been set to shut down at 8 p.m., two hours after polls actually closed, said Doris Anne Sadler, Marion County election clerk.

That means that each one must be shut down through a laborious procedure pollworkers have not been trained to perform. The problem should not affect results but will delay gathering them. Sadler said about 50 technicians are in the field helping, and the county now has about a dozen workers using phones to help inspectors at the county's 914 precincts complete the proper steps.

"We don't have direct phone lines for them, so they're calling in on cell phones," she said, "and there are only so many people who can answer them."

The programmer for Election Systems and Software who worked on the Marion County machines also programmed machines in Pennsylvania, Sadler said, where the polls close at 8 p.m.

if this isn't clear enough, i'll rephrase it: the people who programmed the machines got confused. they were also programming machines for pennsylvania, where polls close at 8, so the indiana machines also don't want to close until 8, and poll workers are being forced to jump through hoops just to get the machines to shut down.¶