DENVER -- Two days after the election, the final results in the city and county of Denver have still not come in.

The length of this year's ballot and the failure of one vote-counting machine are blamed for this latest delay.

The final numbers may be available Thursday night or sometime Friday.

Nearly all of the state and local races have been decided, but this is another headache for an election commission that has had a pretty rough week.

At the Denver Election Commission, vote counters are doing something they ordinarily would have wrapped up late on election night.

At the start of Thursday, 35,000 of an estimated 65,000 absentee ballots turned in by Denver voters remained uncounted. The optical scanner that helped cause this backlog was working, and an extra machine had been added.

"Optical scanner's just a machine like anything else. It's like a copier. It's like any other mechanical thing," said Denver Election Commission spokesman Alton Dillard. "You're going to get breakdown, you're going to get occasional failure."

Election officials said it's a different kind of failure from the one that prompted such long lines on Election Day.

"Any time you're talking about serving the number of customers that we serve, we're going to have hitches and hiccups," said Dillard.

This kind of vote counting also takes time. Ballots kicked out by the scanners for one reason or another have to be examined individually by employees.

It could be another long night for them.

"That's irrelevant. The main thing is we're going to get these ballots knocked out now," said Dillard.

Because of the thousands of votes that remain uncounted, one tight race is still up in the air.

Denver question 1A, which would raise the sales tax to help parents pay for preschool education, is still undecided as the votes continue to be counted.

Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz, who opposes 1A, said the results cannot be released soon enough.

"It's just like watching paint dry. It goes very, very slowly," said Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz. "I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. Any citizen who's interested and certainly the proponents are going to be feeling this long wait, too."

On Thursday night, 50.13 percent of the votes were in favor of 1A and 49.87 percent were against the issue. That count is within the 0.5 percent needed for an automatic recount.

In the meantime, papers challenging Denver's current electoral structure were filed Thursday.

Denver's City Council met Thursday morning to talk about the election problems.

They agreed to hold a public hearing on the election problems to get feedback from the community.

City auditor Dennis Gallagher said Wednesday he wants the city clerk to be fired after the problems on Election Day.