DES MOINES — A glitch with Greene County’s central vote counting machine was holding up the vote count from six precincts early Wednesday.

The machine broke about 11 p.m. Tuesday, stalling the count for president and every other race in the central Iowa county about 25 miles northwest of Des Moines.

“It just quit,” Auditor Jane Heun said Wednesday. “It’s not like it shut off. We couldn’t shut if off — and we finally shut it off, after several tests, we couldn’t get it started back up.”

When the machine quit, nine of Greene County’s 15 precincts had been counted. President Bush was leading Democrat John Kerry 1,376 to 1,364.

A new machine, from Election Systems & Software, and a repairman from Omaha, Neb., arrived at the courthouse in Jefferson early Wednesday, Heun said.

County Treasurer Donna Lawson said elections officials, using a replacement machine, started counting again at 9:45 a.m. The machine would be used to rerun the tallies for all 15 precincts, not just the six left uncounted Tuesday night, elections officials said.

ES&S spokesman Rob Palmer said he did not know what caused the problem with the machine, a Model 115 optical scan machine. It reads paper ballots on which ovals have been filled in with a pencil.

“You put a stack of ballots in one side and it scans through” and counts the votes, he said.

Palmer said he didn’t know how old the broken machine was or how long Greene County has used it.

“We’ll have to get it back and check through it and do some testing and see if and what the issue was,” he said.

ES&S, a leading election management company, is headquartered in Omaha, and has a customer base of over 1,700 jurisdictions in 46 states, Canada, and several international locations, according to its Web site.

Elections officials said it likely would take until the afternoon to count all the ballots, and Heun said she was very aware that Greene County was the last in Iowa to report its Election Day votes.

“Yeah, you’re absolutely right,” she said.

Still to be tabulated across the state were about 30,000 to 50,000 unreturned absentee ballots and a small number of provisional ballots. Absentee ballots postmarked by Nov. 1 and received by noon the following Monday will be counted.