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GREENSBORO - Guilford County will have enough voting machines to meet the demand of registered voters, according to George Gilbert, the county's elections director.

Gilbert said this morning that the state's only authorized electronic voting machine company, Election Systems & Software, told him that the county's most recent order of 181 machines will be filled in time for early voting beginning Oct. 16.

Earlier this month, Gilbert said that Guilford County might not have been able to purchase the machines it needed to handle the expected crowds in the fall election. The Nebraska-based election machine company said that about half of the order could be filled.

"We were going to have them all, one way or another," Gilbert said, adding that if the order had fallen through with ES&S, Guilford County could have borrowed some from Mecklenburg County.

The extra machines that ES&S will provide are used machines, he said.

Now, after a voter registration recount, Gilbert said that Guilford County actually has more machines than it needs. And that's a fortunate problem, because neighboring Forsyth County faces an election machine shortfall this year.

"My counterpart in Winston-Salem needs 14 or 15, and it turns out that we need 168, rather than 181," Gilbert said.

The extra machines are slated to head to Forsyth County, he said.

"The equipment is kind of hard to get a hold of anymore," said Robert Coffman, Forsyth County's elections director. Demand for the machines in some states and a shift in manufacturing away from the touch-screen voting systems to paper-based systems are driving the shortage, Coffman added.

Forsyth needed more voting machines after it added two extra early voting locations, he said.

Contact Gerald Witt at 373-7008 or gerald.witt@news-record.com