PORTLAND (AP) – Technical glitches, human mistakes and surprisingly high voter turnout are complicating efforts to come up with official results for Maine’s caucus, party officials said.

Dottie Melanson, chair of the state Democratic party, said Tuesday that some town’s numbers did not add up and some were “managing their caucuses in their own unique ways.”

Adding to the difficulty, the party’s computers crashed Monday, further slowing the count, Melanson said.

Under party rules, municipalities have until Feb. 15 to report numbers to party headquarters.

Sunday’s caucus was Maine’s first presidential preference caucus in a dozen years, and some of the problems were “the normal kinds of things that you have when you have a big process with a lot of people and a lot of math and a lot of rules,” Melanson said.

In one case, absentee ballots sent to one caucus convener were returned to party headquarters by the postal service. The two absentee ballots changed the town’s outcome.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Melanson was still waiting for a report from Portland, which had the state’s largest caucus. The city’s convener Dory Waxman had yet to have a count.

“Why did it take so long? Because we had 900 more people than we expected. That’s part of it,” Waxman said, adding it took time to go through the reporting forms and validate them.

Waxman said the forms spent Monday and Tuesday “on my kitchen table … with my big, yellow dog guarding them.”

“I’m surprised that it’s taking so long,” said Gail Babbitt, a Dean supporter who lives in Deer Isle. “I was quite troubled to read about the box of ballots on somebody’s kitchen table.”

But Jesse Connolly, a state spokesman for Sen. John Kerry, said plenty of people have been paying close attention to the number and that he trusts the people handling the ballots.

“People from all the different campaigns were looking over everyone’s shoulders while the caucus was happening,” Connolly said.

Connolly added he would like official numbers sooner rather than later, but “there was a record turnout, and I think the party is doing the very best that they can.”

The number of delegates that each candidate will take to the national convention in Boston is still unclear. It depends on the turnout at the state convention in May.

AP-ES-02-11-04 0217EST