But outgoing Miami-Dade Commission Chairman Joe Martinez, who lost a mayoral race to Gimenez, said elections supervisors should have planned better after complaints poured in regarding long lines during early voting.

“It’s the perfect storm. It was a combination of everything: high voter turnout, some machines not working properly, trouble finding people on the vote rolls,’’ he said. “You should have been prepared for it because we went through this already with Obama in 2008.’’

During a radio interview with WLRN, the Miami Herald’s news partner, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, summed up her views of the long lines: “This election was a disaster.’’

Miami attorney Kendall Coffey, who has worked for Democratic presidential candidates since the Bush vs. Gore recount battle in 2000, said Scott could have alleviated the lines by following former Gov. Charlie Crist’s lead and adding more early voting days.

Scott, speaking to reporters on Wednesday, said his administration, like any business, needed to review how it managed the vote while keeping an eye on the budget.

“Whenever you finish a project, in this case an election,’’ he said, “let’s go back and look. What went right? What can we improve?”

Broward may not have been as bad as Miami-Dade on Election Day, but it had its share of problems, from long waits at major polling stations to running out of ballots at certain precincts.

“The big picture is that we have done this to ourselves,” Broward County Mayor John Rodstrom, a Democrat, said. “It’s symptomatic of the fact that we are now moving city elections and city items to a regular [November] election. We have these tremendously long ballots now.”

Broward GOP chairman Richard DeNapoli said “it was unconscionable that the supervisor of elections didn’t see this coming.” He said that some precincts were much larger than others and that meant some of the larger ones didn’t have enough scanners to process the ballots.

But Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes defended the work of her office as employees continued to process absentee ballots Wednesday.

“All of us who watch elections know when voters are interested in candidates and issues, we are going to have long lines,” Snipes said.

A range of problems contributed to the long lines in Miami-Dade, and the delay in tallying absentee ballots that flooded in on Monday and Tuesday. Turnout was only a minor factor, with just an 8 percent increase in Election Day voters over the number from 2008, a presidential race with few problems. Slightly more than 400,000 people voted in their precincts on Tuesday.

A bottleneck

But Gimenez said the county should have accounted for the lengthy ballot by providing more voting booths, ballot scanners and workers at large precincts, and by organizing the process to avoid a bottleneck of voters being checked in.

Christina White, the deputy elections supervisor, said she couldn’t explain specific problems at each poorly performing precinct, except at UTD Towers on Brickell, where the mayor apologized to hundreds of voters still in line when polls closed.

The building, once home to just two precincts, grew by four more under redistricting in 2010. The expanded polling station in the booming Brickell area catered to voters from six precincts, each with different ballots. Each of the scanning machines on hand was coded to read just one precinct, not all six. Voters also jammed the scanning machines in some instances by stuffing all of the ballot pages in at once, she said.