Beaufort Co. primary election issues stemmed from ‘miscommunication,’ local official says
During a nearly hour-long probe by state legislators into Beaufort County’s early voting primary election issues, a local election official chalked it up to “miscommunication.”
The problem was first uncovered on June 8 when Mike Covert of Bluffton, who had been campaigning for the District 6 seat on the Beaufort County Council, couldn’t find his name on the ballot when he went to early vote.
He alerted the Beaufort County Board of Voter Registration and Elections of the issue. The board then identified 70 people who had been given ballots with the wrong county council seat due to redistricting information that was not updated to voting records, according to previous Island Packet reporting.
The error came on the heels of the county approving changes in political boundaries based on new population data in January.
On Thursday, nearly four months after the primary election, a South Carolina Election Commission review, holding state and local election officials’ accountable, painted a clearer picture of the missteps.
In addition to the 70 people who received a ballot with the wrong county council district, a report revealed 3,237 voters in the county of about 135,000 were not redistricted at the county-council level. The majority of those — 2,038 — existed among 15 precincts.
In what is a tedious process to reassign voters after redistricting occurs, Howard Knapp, executive director for the South Carolina Election Commission, explained to the Legislative Delegation of Beaufort County that the mistakes lie in the county not telling the SEC to move the voters.
Knapp said no other county in the state had issues in the primary election.
During the crossfire, State Sen. Tom Davis read from the summation of the report stating that the SEC “reviewed the redistricting data from Beaufort County and found that Beaufort County understood voters needed to be redistricted at the county council level, but never redistricted them nor asked the SEC manually redistrict any voters.” The county board of elections received multiple error lists, but there was no record of it requesting the SEC to move the voters, he continued.
“This report is fairly damning in regard to having the resources, being alerted to the errors and not correcting those errors,” Davis said. “It’s a serious matter, people were disenfranchised.”
The county was found to have adequate time and staffing, sufficient funding and a County GIS to perform the mapping. They are luxuries that not all counties have, Davis outlined.
“I guess it begs the question why a wealthy county, like Beaufort County, with an experienced staff, these problems still arise,” the senator said.
Marie Smalls, Beaufort County Board of Voter Registration and Elections director, contested that when they got the report of the errors from the Beaufort County GIS, the issue was fixed on a county level. Then, her office verbally told the SEC. However, the voter district changes were “not corrected on the state level,” she said.
“There’s enough blame to go around,” Smalls said. “I’m going to say it’s a miscommunication.”
Regardless of fault, Knapp and Smalls reiterated that the County Board of Voter Registration and Elections fixed the problem immediately when it surfaced during early voting.
To address the issues, the SEC created a new election database for the impacted precincts to ensure voters got the right ballot on Election Day, a county news release said Saturday. But because of the additional system, it created a dual-election database situation, which caused complications with election night results reporting.
The local office manually re-ran every single ballot in order to certify the correct counts, Smalls said. With the upcoming General Election, a new tool will merge the two databases together to save time and tedium.
“We recognize the mistake and I can assure the voters of Beaufort County it will not happen again,” Smalls said.
In South Carolina, early voting begins Oct. 24 and Election Day is Nov. 8.
