As with the other conventions of the time, the new leader was decided by runoff voting. Multiple votes were held, and after each round the candidate with the fewest votes was removed from the ballot. This continued until a single candidate won a majority. In the 1968 convention, this process took four ballots and seven-and-a-half hours. The delay was blamed on the new IBM punched card machines that were used to count the votes. Despite instructions not to, a good number of the delegates folded their punched card as they would a normal ballot. These folded ballots caused the machines to repeatedly jam.