Officials To Investigate Richland Co. Voting Troubles

While the question of who won the races for public office in Richland County has been decided, there are still plenty of questions about what caused voters to stand in line for up to five hours on Tuesday.

Now, one candidate has called for another election. The head of the SCGOP called for an investigation. And one state lawmaker said the problem was caused by "inexperience, incompetence or something worse.”

It wasn’t long on Election Day that it became apparent there was a problem.

Throughout Richland County word spread via social media that there were lengthy lines at voting places.

One of those who noticed was Nathan Ballentine, the S.C. House representative from District 71 in Richland County. Ballentine began receiving messages from constituents about long lines.

“At first, I thought it was just due to the interest in the Presidential election,” Ballentine said.

But the messages persisted and constituents told him that there were far fewer voting machines at polling stations than there had been in the past and that some of the machines weren’t working. 

Tell Patch how long you waited at the polls HERE.

So, Ballentine called Lillian McBride, Voter Registration and Election Commission director in Richland County and, according to Ballentine, McBride told him she sent additional machines to polling stations.

That did little to abate the problem, as a number of polling stations reported having fewer machines than in previous elections and, in many cases, at least one of the machines wasn’t working properly.

The shortage in polling machines and machines that were broken created lengthy lines throughout the county, causing some to vote late into the evening hours, .

Now, Ballentine and fellow representative James Smith of District 72 are looking for answers.

They have called a public hearing which will be chaired by Sen. Darrell Jackson and Richland County Council Chair Kelvin Washington. It’s tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, but Ballentine is hoping to move it up to Friday.

The key question is why were so few machines allocated to some precincts, a decision that appears to have been made by McBride.

The state polling managers handbook says that there should be one voting machine for every 250 registered voters.

But McBride told The State newspaper yesterday that her predecessor, Mike Cinnamon, left her with insufficient data for her to accurately evaluate how many voting machines to put in each precinct, a notion that Cinnamon refuted.

“This is not rocket science,” Ballentine said. “You look up how many registered voters there are in a precinct and you assign the number of voting machines to that polling machine. What happened is the result of inexperience, incompetence or something worse.”

See how many voting machines your precinct should have had here.

McBride is appointed to her position by a six-member Election Commission. The Commission is chosen by Richland County’s Legislative Delegation which can be viewed here.

In the event of shortage of machines, McBride would have requested more be purchased with county funds. A new machine costs $3,000 but a refurbished could be purchased for less money. According to Smith, it is not unusual for local governments to refurbished machines.

But a lack of machines does not appear to have been the problem, nor is the fact that some of them broke down.

“With 1,000 voting machines in the county, (some) will go down,” Smith said. “That’s to be expected and that’s why you have backups."

On Wednesday, outrage mounted. South Carolina GOP Chair Chad Connelly called for an independent investigation into the problems. Smith did not rule that out as a possibility.

“I think it’s something we may need to do to assure that all the facts come out,” he said.

Also, Michael Letts, a County Council candidate, filed a complaint with the Elections Board asking for a new elections because of a variety of problems. Read it here.

Todd Kincannon, an attorney who is an expert on voting laws, isn’t sure there is much grounds for a lawsuit.

“People almost certainly went home after waiting in line too long. But, in order for a lawsuit to be successful it would have to be proven that the people leaving would have changed the outcome of the election,” he said.

“Which is hard to do, because we’ll never know who those people would have voted for. There are a lot of complaints about the Voter ID laws suppressing the vote, but the best way to keep people from voting is to make them wait in line for five hours."

Ballentine thinks the incident sends a terrible message.

“People hate politics and hate politicians enough as it is and the chance to vote is the chance for them to have their voice heard. And for something like this to happen?”

“Voting is at the heart of our democracy,” Smith said. “We need to do everything possible to preserve that.”

The end result of the problems on Tuesdsay means that, even though the number of registered voters increased from 2008 to 2012 by more than 26,000, nearly 15,250 fewer people voted with totals from two precincts still outstanding.