The recount of the votes cast for the office of district attorney in Schuylkill County, which was to take place this morning at the courthouse in Pottsville, was postponed until Wednesday morning.

Hearings on the petitions to recount the vote for supervisor in Schuylkill Township and mayor of Mahanoy City will proceed this morning as scheduled.The delay in the DA recount was caused by a last minute petition filed by another group of Democratic voters. President Judge William E. Baldwin scheduled a hearing to be held on this petition this morning.The result of the Municipal General Election last Nov. 5, as released by the Schuylkill County Election Board, gave Distriict Attorney Elect Christine Holman, Republican, 15,265 votes and Incumbent District Attorney Karen Byrnes Noon, Democrat, 15,192 votes.The first petition filed was by Brian Tobin, Tim Seip, and Jennifer Laughlin requesting the recount and recanvas the absentee ballots upon the failure of the board of elections to properly count the absentee ballots and correctly compute the election machine votes and absentee votes for Noon.The second petition, for which a hearing was called, was filed by 21 petitioners asks for a recount and recanvas all of the approximately 1,600 paper ballots cast in the genmeral election.The petition states the voting was done by means of a Diebold electronic voting machine and paper ballots for absentee and overseas voters which are then scanned through an Accuvote 2000 optical scanner/reader and write-in votes on the actual voting machines which is part of the paper record of the election.The petition claims the margin of error is less than one half of one percent of the total county vote for the office of district attorney which is within the margin which would trigger an automatic recount.The petitioners claim, on information received which is considered reliable, they believe that an error in counting absentee and overseas ballots occurred although not manifest upon the general return of the votes there from was committed in the computation of the votes cast for district attorney.The petitioners allege there appeared to be a computer glitch during the counting of the absentee ballots in that the optical scanner would not read some of the absentee ballots. The petitioners allege that such count and canvass of the absentee ballots on Nov. 5 was in fact inaccurate and does not show the true number of absentee votes cast for each of the candidates for the office of DA.The petitioners allege Noon is the winner of the election and they further allege that a substantial error has been committed therein in the counting of the votes and absentee and overseas ballot for the office of district attoney.They ask the court to issue an order to appoint a committee to conduct a recount of the county wide paper ballots, including the absentee and overseas vote related to the error in counting of absentee and oversea ballots and the provisional ballots and the write-in ballots, if applicable.The named petitioners are Marcia A. Bonner, Robert C. Bonner, Heather L. Bixler, Marybeth C. Matz, Rebecca A. Elo, Elizabeth A. Bettinger, Hugh M.S. Reiley, Judith A. Schweich, Joseph F. Spotts III, Leo G. Martin, Tim Seip, Jen Laughlin, Brian Tobin, Michael P. Vigoda III, Lori A. Spotts, Charles M. Noecker, Douglas J. Taglieri, Bruce J. Kosack, Marie C. Noon, Paul N. Noon, and Elizabeth Noon.