Richland County residents report few, broken machines
Lines snaked through hallways and in and out of buildings as voters in certain precincts faced waiting times of up to seven hours Tuesday night.
“We expect lines on Election Day ... but for someone to have to wait five or six hours is unacceptable,” said Chris Whitmire, a spokesman for the South Carolina State Election Commission.
Voters reported few voting machines at their precincts, and some of those machines faced technical issues, slowing lines even more. People stood in line for hours after the polls closed at 7 p.m., determined to make their voices heard.
“People are still voting three and a half hours after the polls have closed and we still have people in lines,” South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian said later at the S.C. Democratic party’s election night celebration. “We’ve had six, seven hour waits at many polls today — inexcusable.”
By South Carolina state law, there must be one voting machine for every 250 registered voters at a precinct. Second-year business student Jennifer Kingsmore voted after waiting for six hours at Dutch Fork Middle School, which is supposed to have 12 voting machines. She said that there were only four at the school and one had broken by 9 a.m., before she’d gotten in line to cast her ballot. One of these was set aside for voters who were unable to stand in line for the hours-long wait.
“The first man they served that way had Parkinson’s disease and had already been in line for two to three hours,” Kingsmore said.
When she finally arrived at a voting machine, she learned that only 500 people had been able to vote in the seven hours the polling place had been open.
“Our precinct has a great voter turnout rate, so at least 80 percent of the remaining 2,500 people most likely were behind us in line or came at some point later,” Kingsmore said.
Harpootlian placed the blame on the state election commission and Gov. Nikki Haley.
“There were too few machines, and it wasn’t planned out well,” he said. “The governor appoints the state election commission and they’re supposed to work with the county election commission to make sure that the resources are there.”
The lack of any early voting besides absentee voting in South Carolina may have also been a cause of the long lines.
“You only have 12 hours to get everyone to vote, and most of those people have jobs and can only vote after 5 or 6 (p.m.), so there are only two hours when the majority of people are trying to vote,” Whitmire said. “We still vote the same way we did in the 1800s. The model was created when we were still an agrarian society and the harvest was done in November, so everyone wasn’t very busy on election day. It doesn’t work the same way it did in the past.”
Measures for early voting have come close to passage with bipartisan support in the State House of Representatives in the past, but none have ever been passed. Whitmire hopes that the chaos of this year’s election will hasten the push for early voting in South Carolina.
“I’ve heard legislators interested in reintroducing it in 2013, so hopefully it will be debated in the General Assembly,” Whitmire said.
While 20 precincts have yet to report vote totals, according to Whitmire, Richland County had a voter turnout of 50.71 percent on Tuesday — the lowest in the entire state.
“There are undoubtedly people who left or heard about the lines or saw the lines and didn’t go vote,” Whitmire said.
“Will it be enough to make a significant statistical difference when you’re talking about more than 100,000 votes cast? Maybe not a statistical difference, but enough of a difference to make someone walk out of that line. There’s no reason that should happen.”
While Whitmire said that specific information about voting machine numbers and problems could only be obtained from the Richland County Elections Commission, repeated calls to the commission throughout Wednesday went unanswered, save for one: a Richland County Elections Commission employee answered the phone and told a reporter “Hello. Goodbye,” before hanging up.