Island County had one of the slowest vote counts in the state Tuesday evening, a fact which caused a scare at the Whidbey Island Hospital District.

Early results showed the Emergency Medical Services levy passing easily by a 72.9 percent margin, but there weren’t nearly enough votes to validate the election.

The early count showed 4,324 voters cast a ballot in the levy election, while 8,190 votes were needed for it to pass.

A Thursday afternoon count showed the number of votes cast increased to 7,308, but that was still short of the amount needed for validation. The later count showed 71.46 percent of the voters approved the levy while 28.54 rejected it.

Because of the low turnout — or slow vote count — hospital commissioners met in a special meeting Thursday afternoon and approved placing the levy proposal on the November ballot.

Doug Bishop, hospital chief financial officer, said he was confident enough votes will be counted to ensure validation, but he wanted to be prepared, just in case.

“I think we’ll be fine. I just don’t want to take that chance,” Bishop said.

He said the commissioners had to approve a resolution Thursday to assure a spot on the November ballot. If the Sept. 14 election is validated, as expected, Thursday’s action will be rescinded.

It was a frustrating Tuesday night for Island County election officials and those who waited up for timely election results, such as candidates and the media.

By night’s end, only 13.3 percent of the total possible votes had been counted, based on the number of registered voters in the county.

Only King County at 11 percent has a lower percentage counted the first day among the state’s 39 counties, according to figures on the Washington Secretary of State’s Web site.

Island County Auditor Suzanne Sinclair wasn’t thrilled to be compared to King County, whose vote counting abilities were heavily criticized in the 2004 gubernatorial race. But she admitted her staff had problems Tuesday stemming from the new Hart Interactive digital scanning voting machines and the primary ballot.

“Our system reads anomalies,” Sinclair said. “Under-votes are the issue.”

The write-in system caused one problem. Voters were supposed to fill in a box when they wrote-in a candidate, but many did not. These votes still count, but the machine noted the anomaly and staff had to take time to inspect the individual ballots.

The same thing happened when voters skipped a race by not voting. The machine also noted this anomaly on the ballots, requiring another hand count.

“They didn’t write in the box,” Sinclair said of voters, “so we had to find those. We had to look at every ballot.”

The Hart machine scans the ballots but doesn’t count them. Ballots are counted in another machine, but not until all ballots are approved. Only two people were available election night to make sure all the anomalous ballots were correct.

“We didn’t have this in other elections,” Sinclair said. “There weren’t so many races people didn’t vote in.” This is the first general election primary for the new voting system.

Sinclair expects November’s general election to go more smoothly as voters will not have to pick a party and there will be far fewer uncontested positions for voters to skip.

News-Times editor Jim Larsen contributed to this story.