DAYTON — Montgomery County Board of Elections workers continued to count paper ballots about 11 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 5, and final, unofficial results could be finished by mid-afternoon.

The counting stopped late Tuesday night when Director Steve Harsman determined that the election staff, which has been working seven days a week without a day off since Labor Day were too tired to continue.

The exhausted staff was sleeping Wednesday at 6:30 a.m. gathering their strength before picking up the counting of paper ballots later in the morning. Many of them who live too far away to drive home and come back were on cots inside the county administration building.

"They were so fatigued they had to get some sleep," said Harsman, who was one of three elections worker who stayed up overnight preparing paper ballots for counting.

By 9 a.m. most of the staff was back on the job, and the lower levels of the administration building had returned to the frenetic pace they've seen for the last few weeks.

The board issued its last update on the vote count in Montgomery County of election night at 10:05 p.m. Tuesday with 45 percent of 548 precincts partially counted. A count that included all the electronic votes and about 10,000 paper ballot votes was released about 9:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Harsman issued the Wenesday morning report with a disclaimer that they are not complete results. He estimated about 50,000 paper ballots were cast, and the bulk of those ballots were just beginning to be counted by mid-morning Wednesday.

"With that many votes not counted, it could very definitely change the outcomes on some of the races. That's why when we issue the final electronic count, that won't be the last word," Harsman said.

Harsman had feared that half the votes cast in Montgomery County on Tuesday might be on paper ballots as voters opted to avoid long lines at voting machines and chose paper ballots instead. It turned out, though, that many more voters chose electronic voting, though the comparative percentages of electronic and paper ballots have not been determined.

Paper ballots, all of them two pages long, have to be hand-fed into scanners to be tabulated, Harsman said.

Election staff members were tired but in good spirits Wednesday as they approached the end of the most intense election cycle they've ever experienced, said Betty Smith, deputy director of the Montgomery County Board of Elections.

"We missed a whole season," Smith said. "We've been coming in before the sun comes up and going home after the sun goes down.

"In Kettering where I live they're starting to put up Christmas decorations, and we feel like we've been in the basement of the county building since summer."

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2395 or jcummings@DaytonDailyNews.com.