Move over, butterfly ballot.

Meet the creased ballot.

In the latest Palm Beach County election mix-up, it appears that high-speed tabulators aren't properly reading some absentee ballots because of the crease that was created when they were folded to put in mailing envelopes.

Unlike the infamous butterfly ballot that threw the 2000 presidential election into chaos, the creased ballot is unlikely to affect vote totals in Tuesday's election.

Instead, it will create more work - lots more work - for elections officials who are dealing with myriad issues in the run-up to what is likely to be the election with the biggest turnout in county history.

"Each election has its own lingo," said County Judge Barry Cohen, a member of the canvassing board, which monitors the election. "Where were you for the crease issue?"

The crease issue surfaced Friday when elections officials noticed that the machines were spitting out ballots that should have been tabulated. The reliability of the tabulators was questioned during a monthlong recount of a judicial race in the Aug. 26 primary.

When elections officials this week tried to figure out why good ballots were being rejected, they began suspecting that the machines are incorrectly reading the crease as a vote. That would mean they are incorrectly reporting that a person voted for more than one candidate in a race that lines up near the fold.

Since so-called overvotes aren't allowed, the machines are programmed to reject ballots where they occur. Those ballots, along with ones that voters didn't mark properly, are then given to the canvassing board to review.

In the course of normal events, the canvassing board would simply note the overvote and instruct staff to run the ballot back through the machine and count all the other votes on the ballot.

But, because of the crease issue, they are worried that legitimate votes could be discounted because the machine is reading the crease as an overvote.

While the races affected vary depending on the ballot, the crease runs through the 13-candidate presidential contest on all absentee ballots. Canvassing board members, however, said it appears more likely that it would affect other races, such as the District 89 state House race between Jeffrey Auslander and Mary Brandenburg.

Rather than risk miscounting votes in any race, they are asking staff to duplicate all questionable ballots. They will then review those ballots again to ensure they are duplicated properly. The amount of work involved to count the ballots doubles.

With a record-shattering 115,000 absentee ballots expected to be cast by Tuesday, Cohen said the extra work involved is troubling.

"I'm becoming overwhelmed by the number of hours it's going to require," Cohen said.

The extent of the problem is unclear.

Mike Simmons, fiscal director for Palm Beach International Airport, who is heading up efforts to organize ballot-counting, said it doesn't appear widespread.

Of the roughly 25,000 absentee ballots that were run through the machines, all but about 3,000 were tabulated successfully.

The canvassing board reviewed about 150 of the 3,000 ballots Friday. Of those, about 45 were affected by the crease issue.

Commissioner Karen Marcus, who is a member of the canvassing board, said she wants to make sure there really is a problem before asking an overburdened staff to do more work.

She asked that about 350 of the questionable ballots be run through the machines a second time to see if they are rejected again.

"We've used these absentee ballots forever with the same equipment," she said of the machines that date to 2002. There's never been a crease problem, she said.

But in the Aug. 26 primary there were problems with the high-speed tabulators. Attorneys representing losing Circuit Judge Richard Wennet had county staff run 102 ballots through two tabulators. One machine counted votes on 90 ballots and rejected 12 ballots. When the same ballots were put through another machine, it counted votes on 13 ballots and rejected 89. All of the ballots had been rejected in previous recounts.

Attorney Gerald Richman, who represents Wennet, then questioned the reliability of the machines, claiming the test results boded ill for the presidential election.

However, on Friday, while representing the Democratic Party and presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign, he said he wasn't concerned about the crease issue.

"What it means is more work," he said. "It's not a vote issue."