The advisory group, which plans to meet again on Jan. 7, will now turn its attention to potential changes at the county level.

The elections report makes a slew of departmental recommendations, including several big-ticket items:

• Open more than 20 early-voting sites for larger, presidential elections. This year, sites cost $20,000 per day to operate.

• Replace the single absentee ballot-sorting machine with two machines, allowing the department to have a backup. Estimated cost: $1.2 million.

• Purchase electronic voter registries to use at all precincts on Election Day. The cost for 1,040 registries to use at 520 sites: $1.6 million.

The report doesn’t provide cost estimates for other recommendations, including considering purchasing signature-verification computer software. Gimenez said he wants his administration to spend some time considering technology upgrades, to ensure the new equipment will work before making purchases that may be old in two or four years.

“We don’t want to continue to change our processes after every presidential election,” he said. “It’s very expensive, and you’re just basically crawling until the next solution.”

The report provides a precinct-by-precinct breakdown of voting equipment, noting that the department added ballot scanners to 41 precincts expected to have high turnout, based on numbers from the last day of early voting. On Election Day, 167 more scanners were prepared to deploy to the polls.

But, illustrating some of the department’s challenges, Miami-Dade was only able to verify that 66 of those scanners were delivered and put to work. “While we believe the additional 101 scanners were delivered, the transfer of custody forms normally used to validate delivery were not available,” the report says.

Elsewhere in the report, the department concluded that only six polling locations, out of 541, had voters casting ballots after midnight on Election Day. One location was in the city of Miami, the other five were in West Kendall and Southwest Miami-Dade, which saw a population boom in the decade since the county last redrew its precincts.

County records showed that 24 polls closed after midnight. But in 18 of those sites, voters weren’t still voting, the report says; poll workers just took longer to notify the elections department that they were closed.

The last voter, according to the report, voted at Eureka Villas Park in Southwest Miami-Dade at 1:18 a.m. — more than an hour after Republican Mitt Romney had conceded to Democratic President Barack Obama.