CROWN POINT | The Lake County elections board adopted a plan Thursday to speed up the vote tally this fall, attempting to avoid the delays such as those experienced in last week's primary that made the county the butt of political jokes nationwide.

Nicholas Gasparovic, assistant county elections board director, said county officials intend to hire additional temporary staff to count paper absentee ballots with the goal of having 98 percent of the vote counted by 10 p.m. Nov. 4. During the primary, vote counting went into the early morning hours with no definitive results.

"Our primary concern has been getting the tally right because of the problems with Lake County's image, but at the same time, the media has a genuine concern, too," Gasparovic said.

Lake County GOP Chairman John Curley said Lake County was the first in the state to completely count all 130,463 ballots cast May 6 -- about 12 hours after the polls closed.

However, the county devoted so much effort into the time-consuming process of counting more than 10,000 paper absentee ballots, it put off public release of the bulk of the vote count from electronic voting machines until late in the television and national media evening news cycle.

Media pundits suggested election trickery was at work. Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott went on national television to accuse Gary Mayor Rudy Clay of holding up the vote count to help Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Barack Obama.

Clay denied the allegation. Pat Gabrione, a Republican elections board member, said Thursday, "Rudy wasn't holding up the vote. There is no question about the integrity of the count."

Gasparovic said more staff will be hired and devoted to absentee ballot counting, which will start earlier in the day.

"We have a target time of 6 p.m. to complete that," Gasparovic said.

He said the absentee counting will be moved out of the counting center and into the government center cafeteria, leaving more room to organize the ballots and staff.

He said they hope to start running the walk-in absentee vote immediately afterward and issue reports at 7, 8:30 and 10 p.m. with increasingly larger percentages of the total vote as data cards from the county's more than 1,000 electronic voting machines are brought into the central counting area from more than 500 locations.