Leaving unattended votes at Beaufort Co. polling sites is ‘unacceptable,’ state official says

Election managers left behind votes at two Beaufort County polling locations Tuesday night, delaying delivery of results until 11 p.m., said Marie Smalls, director of the Beaufort County Board of Voter Registration and Elections. And it’s not the first time, she said.

Votes are never supposed to be left unattended, and a South Carolina Election Commission official said Wednesday the commission will offer training assistance to Beaufort County officials to prevent a recurrence. The commission learned about the issue Wednesday from a reporter with the Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette.

“People make mistakes, but it is unacceptable if it is happening multiple times,” said Chris Whitmire, the state commission’s director of public information and training. “If it is happening multiple times in the same place, then there is a question about training and staffing.”

The Beaufort County election commission released the complete, unofficial vote counts just after midnight Tuesday. The process was significantly delayed because two poll managers left their polling sites and forgot to bring the thumb drives containing the voting data, Smalls said.

Tuesday night wasn’t the first time Beaufort County poll workers have left votes behind, Smalls said. She recalled votes sitting overnight in locked buildings as poll managers waited for janitors to arrive the next morning to unlock the facilities.

Smalls said Tuesday night wasn’t as difficult. The managers returned to their polling locations and retrieved the thumb drives more quickly than in the past. She did not say which precincts were involved.

“We are hoping we can come up with a better system,” Smalls said. She was sure Tuesday night that the buildings were locked and that there were no security risks.

Closing the Polls

The process works like this:

Each precinct has a poll manager in charge of opening and closing the polls.

“South Carolina’s poll managers are chosen for their trustworthiness and high integrity,” the state’s election commission’s website says. “They take an Oath of Office to uphold the public trust.”

The S.C. poll managers’ handbook says ballots should never be left unattended and that all polling materials should be returned immediately to the county office.

Whitmire, from the state commission, noted that poll managers’ duties include making sure machines are shut down, ballots reconciled and the site cleaned up.

Poll managers also print results from the ballot scanner. A printout is taped to the polling site’s door; a copy is given to the election commission.

The manager is responsible for removing the thumb drive containing vote data from the scanner and delivering it to the county election commission.

While Whitmire stressed that the thumb drives should never be left, he doubted, like Smalls, there was reason for concern about the validity of the votes. The system has built in a series of checks and balances, he said.

“We are always concerned about security and the chain of custody,” Whitmire said. “But if the other checks and balances match up, there isn’t as much of a concern. The bottom line is that you have the paper ballots. That is the beauty of the new system.”

If the data on the thumb drive matches the printout, Whitmire said, the data hasn’t been tampered with.

Closing the polls in Beaufort County

Beaufort County uses what it calls “collection sites,” where precincts bring their votes. Once all precincts have delivered their votes to the designated collection site, the votes are transported to the election commission’s office in Beaufort.

For example, south of the Broad River, Hilton Head and Bluffton each have one collection site. Daufuskie Island’s votes are brought by boat to the Bluffton collection site.

The two poll managers realized they left their votes at the polling sites only after arriving at their collection location, Smalls said. That slowed the process for transporting all votes at that collection site.

“We just have to figure out a way to get the results faster,” Smalls said early Wednesday morning, after the votes had been counted.

Even with the forgotten thumb drives, the night wrapped up two hours earlier than most recent elections, she said. Still, she added, not fast enough.

Whitmire and Smalls said new voting machines may have exacerbated some of the hiccups Tuesday night.

“If I had to grade it,” Smalls said, “I would give it a B minus.”

She said the election commission plans to learn from the issues and improve by the 2020 election.