Election Commissioner Elizabeth Ensley said workers discovered problems Wednesday morning with returns from 42 of 198 precincts scattered throughout the county. She promised the office would develop a plan for preventing such errors and rechecking tallies, to spot problems earlier.

Ensley declined to say how many workers were involved in the errors, which involved the faulty entry of results from mail-in paper ballots from military personnel and American citizens living overseas. Those ballots were counted by hand.

Ensley's disclosure of the problems raised questions about the margin in the hotly contested Republican primary in the 2nd Congressional District, where State Treasurer Lynn Jenkins narrowly defeated former Rep. Jim Ryun.

But in the more accurate count, Jenkins' lead widened by 374 votes, to 1,379 out of more than 66,000 cast.

"It is strictly a human error," Ensley said at a news conference. "I'm not going to go through the details of the process in my office. I'm responsible for the way it's set up and the number of people involved."

Republicans watching the 2nd District race closely were in a forgiving mood, even though they acknowledged news of the problem made them uneasy.

Christian Morgan, the state GOP's executive director, said the problems resulted from honest mistakes.

"We didn't want this to happen in November, and they caught whatever mistake or whatever problem in process that they had in August, which is just fine," he said. "After that, eh, no big deal."

Most Shawnee County residents vote either on computerized touch screens or on paper ballots that are "read" by optical scanners.

But the paper ballots that Ensley's office prepared and mailed to Shawnee County voters living overseas could not be read the scanners, so her office had to enter the results into computers by hand. Some of the results were entered in the wrong columns, she said.

The errors began with 43 such ballots, and contributed to the omission of about 4,400 ballots from what the county reported as its final results.

In announcing results Tuesday night, Ensley's office said about 27,000 Shawnee County residents cast ballots, or 26 percent of those registered to vote. The revised total was more than 31,000, or 31 percent.