PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island voters set a turnout record Tuesday, eclipsing a mark set in the presidential election of 1992 that propelled Bill Clinton into the White House.

Final counts of the vote, however, won’t be completed until today at the earliest, with election officials spending yesterday working their way through a large number of mail ballots and untangling returns from Smithfield.

But even with all that, the 1992 mark of 453,477 votes is certain to fall.

Officials at the state Board of Elections yesterday finished tabulating machine ballots in the race among Democrat Barack Obama, Republican John McCain and five minor party candidates. In all, 446,005 machine ballots were cast, leaving the tally a little more than 7,000 votes shy of the record.

But that doesn’t count the mail ballots and provisional ballots.

The numbers of those ballots remained uncertain yesterday, but 26,375 voters had requested mail ballots.

Elections board Executive Director Robert Kando estimated that 20,000 mail ballots were returned. “If we’re within 7,000, then we’ll set a record,” Kando said.

Kando said he hopes to finish counting the mail ballots today.

In many cases, the margins in the preliminary returns are so great that even if all of the mail ballots requested have been returned by voters, and even if all of those votes go to the losing candidate, it won’t change the outcome.

However, there are at least three races in the state Senate and nine in the House of Representatives where the mail ballots could theoretically reverse the preliminary results, although in some cases it would take a very lopsided distribution of the mail ballots to alter the outcome.

Although Tuesday’s turnout will surpass the 1992 mark in numbers, set when Clinton faced Republican George H.W. Bush and independent H. Ross Perot, the modern record for percent turnout is not in danger. In 1980, when Republican Ronald Reagan unseated Democrat Jimmy Carter, 79 percent of Rhode Island’s registered voters cast ballots. To match that mark, more than 550,000 Rhode Islanders would have had to vote Tuesday.

Tuesday’s turnout was the third record performance for Rhode Island’s electorate this year. The turnout of more than 200,000 in March’s presidential primary set a record, as did the voter registration of 701,126 for this week’s election.

The voter registration record was spurred by a surge in the number of people younger than 30 signing up to vote. A preliminary analysis of Tuesday’s results shows, however, that young voters did not turn out as reliably as older voters. The Providence Journal divided voting precincts into five groups based on the average age of people registered to vote in that precinct.

While turnout in the four oldest groups ranged from 63 to 64 percent, turnout in the youngest group was 51 percent. Further analysis is needed to compare that with earlier elections. When the state compiles more detailed information on who voted Tuesday, more precise measures of turnout by age can be made.

The problem in Smithfield was caused by incorrectly printed ballots that included the name of a Town Council candidate who had dropped out. The election computer systems had been changed to reflect his departure, but the ballots had not, so when voters tried to feed the ballots into voting machines, the machines wouldn’t accept them.

The secretary of state’s office produced new, correct ballots within a few hours. But safeguards built into the system left the Board of Elections with the difficult task of getting the returns from the incorrect ballots into the system so they could be combined with the rest of the returns.

Tuesday night, the board planned to copy the voting information from the incorrect ballots onto new ones, and count them like other ballots. But copying the information from 3,000 ballots was too time-consuming, Kando said, and increased the possibility of error.

Instead, he said, the board staff was able to use the election equipment yesterday to create subtotals for each candidate for each polling place. Election workers then entered those figures into the system by hand, he said.

pparker@projo.com