INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Indiana counties inundated with voter registrations thanks to the hotly contested Democratic presidential primary are struggling to process the applications in time to send their poll books to printers, and some say a state system designed to clean up voter rolls is hindering their progress.

Some 160,000 voter registrations were processed in Indiana since January, bringing the number of registered voters up to nearly 4.28 million, the Secretary of State's office said. In the week before the April 7 registration deadline for the May 6 primary, nearly 86,000 forms were submitted.

The crush caused voter registration offices around Indiana to hire additional staff, extend hours and work through weekends to process the forms.

"It's been a train wreck," said John Riordan, Democratic member of the Marion County voter registration board in Indianapolis. "The reason we're working 24 hours is because the system is working so poorly."

The county had about 20 temporary workers and staff working 24 hours a day to process more than 40,000 applications they'd received since March 25.

Registration officials in counties including Lake, Allen and Vanderburgh said it could take six minutes or more to enter one voter into the database during peak periods.

"The system seems to be running slower as the day gets longer," Bartholomew County Clerk Tami Hines said Wednesday.

Some counties said they could print supplemental poll books for names that weren't processed by printing deadlines.

Deputy Secretary of State Matt Tusing said "the speed and performance of the system is a minor problem."

"This perfect storm got generated but the system was stable and robust," Tusing said. "It's caused a little bit of a hang-up at the local level. All in all, the system did well."

In 2006, all 92 Indiana counties began entering voter records into a database that is connected to several others, including those at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and Department of Correction, to eliminate redundancies and deactivate deceased or incarcerated voters.

A presentation delivered at a Thursday meeting between county officials and Quest Information Systems, the state's database vendor, acknowledged the company received complaints that the system had performed "unacceptable to slower than preferred." It also said there were initial indications the system "did not meet some contractual service minimums between the dates of April 7th and 11th."

Rokita's office said it was confident that everyone who registered would be able to vote.

Howard County Clerk Mona Myers said she's afraid problems with the database will be magnified in the lead-up to November's general election.

"I know what's coming," the Republican said. "I don't know that we're going to be able to get everything done and that's the scary thing because when it comes down to it, the clerks are responsible."

Exact year-to-year comparisons were not possible but the number of registrations processed this year may have broken a record for the state, Rokita's office said.

As Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton continued battling for Indiana's 72 delegates to help secure the Democratic nomination, their campaigns conducted registration drives throughout the state, which contributed to a last-minute surge in forms in some counties.

Pennsylvania, which holds its primary on April 22, also experienced a spike in voter registration this year and some counties hired extra staff to handle the deluge.

"We are definitely at record levels for the primary and we are very close to the highest voter registration ever," said Leslie Amoros, spokeswoman for the state's Department of State, which oversees its elections.

Some 217,000 new Pennsylvania voters were added this year, bringing the total number of registered voters to more than 8.3 million, she said.

Wendy Weiser, an attorney with the Brennan Center in New York, said jurisdictions around the country have had trouble processing registrations, as well as staffing polling places and keeping enough supplies on hand.

"This election has generated an unusually high interest and unusually high participation, and we would like to see greater attention to planning," she said. "We don't want to squelch that interest by making the election system inhospitable."

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Associated Press writers Ken Kusmer and Deanna Martin in Indianapolis and Tom Coyne in South Bend contributed to this report.