Beaufort Co. precinct’s Internet loss leaves voters waiting for hours
Some Hilton Head Island voters waited nearly three hours to cast their ballots Friday morning as the north end’s Beaufort County Government Center — one of three absentee voting precincts — experienced an Internet failure that made the check-in system for voters temporarily inaccessible.
Eric Greenway, interim county administrator, said a Hargray fiber cable cut caused the outage, but that everything was fixed by mid-morning. Hargray provides Internet service to the county government.
“It did affect a significant amount of our county government buildings,” Greenway said.
As tens of thousands of Beaufort County residents have taken to the polls for absentee voting over the past month, many have reported long lines even without Internet problems.
“It was kind of shocking to me that for the first time in nine years, I had to wait for four hours in order to get in and vote,” said Joshua Smith, who voted at the Bluffton Recreation Center on Ulmer Road Friday. He said he tends to vote in-person absentee every year.
Smith said he took off the first half of his day from work to vote.
“I cleared my schedule until noon and obviously still missed a few things after that,” he said.
Some voters have started showing up before polls open at 9 a.m. to ensure they have a chance to vote before work or other commitments.
At the county government center on Hilton Head Island, those eager voters had to wait the longest due to the Internet loss. One voter told the Island Packet she showed up to vote at the Hilton Head Island location at 7:30 a.m., but doors didn’t open until around 10:20. She said she worries about something like this happening on Election Day.
Board of Elections and Voter Registration Director Marie Smalls said that an Internet outage is not a concern on Election Day, because the 95 precincts that process voters check them in by referencing a printed-out list of voters given to them by the county. During in-person absentee voting, however, volunteers check voters in through an online system that relies on Internet access.
On Election Day, “[It’s] only those voters that are in their precinct that they have access to,” Smalls said.
But if something goes wrong, she said, the precincts should call the county Board of Elections.
“You have to think of it as we are the parent and they are the children,” she said. “And if they need help, they need to call the parent because they don’t have the same information that we have at the precincts on Election Day.”
