It has been two days since Election Day, and it is still unclear why ballot scanners across Mercer County malfunctioned. The issue meant using backup paper ballots, which slowed vote counting.

The county clerk has now asked the prosecutor’s office to look into the matter. The clerk says she isn’t sure if this was an error or intentional.

This comes as the Board of Elections opened scanning machines from three Princeton election districts Thursday afternoon and found ballots inside that were believed to be missing.

“The rumor mill is just going to churn. The longer the rumor mill takes to get a real answer to people, the more rumors take effect, and the more likely people are to believe them,” says Princeton Mayor Mark Freda.

Freda was not on the ballot on Tuesday, and the two Council members running in town ran unopposed. But the winners in the three school board seats in town can’t be decided until the total vote count is known.

“We just need to have mechanisms in place so that when an error happens, we're as proactive as possible in sharing information as quickly as possible so people understand the systems intact. There's no problem, there's no rigging of votes,” Freda says.

The scanner issues meant that ballots were transported to the Board of Elections’ Lawrence location to be scanned on a high-capacity scanner.

But Robbinsville's mayor was furious when 11% of his town's ballots went missing Wednesday night but were eventually found. Both mayors want better communication from the Board of Elections.

“The whole political environment here is toxic anyway. So, you don’t want to fuel that if you can help it,” says Freda.

Attempts made by News 12 to get a comment from the Board of Elections were unsuccessful.

Freda says results in the Princeton School Board race should be available by Friday morning.