For Jim Martin, months of campaigning in one of the most contentious municipal elections in recent memory had come down to this.

Martin, family members and fellow candidates huddled Tuesday night at a restaurant, where they stared at a computer screen and waited for Lancaster County's Web site to post election results.

Would Martin and his teammates in the Coalition for Effective Government, who were running for commissioner posts in Manheim Township, win or lose? The computer screen would tell them.

By 11:45 p.m., though, the Web site still didn't show 100 percent of the results. And Martin could no longer stay up.

"It is frustrating," Martin said Wednesday. "Everybody has been at the polling places from 7 (a.m.) until 8 or 9 (p.m.), and it makes for a very long day."

Martin, who won his race, was not alone. Candidates and voters across the county did not learn the results of dozens of races until late into the night, and, in some cases, not until Tuesday had turned to Wednesday.

And some candidates, like Martin, couldn't stay up and didn't know if they had won or lost until they woke up the next morning.

"I was so exhausted, I just said, 'It's out of my hands, I'll determine it tomorrow,' " said fellow coalition candidate Mike Flanagan, who went to bed at 12:15 a.m. without knowing whether he had won. "It would be nice to have it that evening."

Flanagan, an attorney who had an arbitration hearing to attend at 7:15 a.m. in Lancaster city, would learn he won by a single vote when he woke up about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Election returns came in unusually slowly Tuesday night because of a combination of several factors, said Mary Stehman, the county's chief election clerk.

The number of municipal races and the number of candidates made Tuesday's election the largest in the last eight years in terms of data, Stehman said.

Each voting machine has a digital card that records the results. Those cards are taken from the individual precincts to a warehouse at Burle Industries Inc. in Manheim Township, where county election officials scan them into a secure computer system.

The results are then e-mailed to a computer inside the election offices at 150 N. Queen St., where a single person transfers the data to the county's Web site and to the Pennsylvania Department of State.

And there were 12,000 write-in votes, which slowed the scanning machines, Stehman said.

By 11 p.m. Tuesday, election results in neighboring counties like York and Dauphin were already posted. Meanwhile, not a single vote appeared on the county's Web site for races in Strasburg Borough and Colerain Township.

Results for both of those races and several others weren't posted until 12:30 a.m.

Since the county exchanged the old lever-voting machines for electronic ones in 2006, election results have been reported later.

When asked if the county Election Board had a message for frustrated candidates and voters, Stehman said: "I was working so closely with it last night, I left for home at 1 o'clock, and I said to myself, 'Oh my goodness, I don't even know who won on anything.' I waited until I got up this morning and watched the news."

When asked again if she had a message, Stehman said: "Not today I don't," adding that no one had called to complain Wednesday about late returns.

County Commissioner Scott Martin, who serves as chairman of the County Elections Board, said he would look into why the returns came in late.

"This is the first time anybody has brought it to my attention, but first thing in the morning, I will try to find out what happened," Martin said.

E-mail: dpidgeon@lnpnews.com