Tuesday’s primary keeps Beaufort County’s reputation for election-night meltdowns alive

Election-night parties in Beaufort County have a new name.

They’re called slumber parties.

Bring a pillow, a jigsaw puzzle or two, and certainly a toothbrush.

For whatever reason — and there have been some doozies — Beaufort County in my lifetime has found it impossible to count votes in a timely fashion.

It happened again this past Tuesday for the Republican and Democratic party primaries.

The polls closed at 7 p.m. The first results were posted around 10:30 p.m., and that was for only 38 of 98 precincts. Results for all but two precincts were posted at 1 a.m. Wednesday.

It was late in the night before any explanation was offered. The delay was caused because some ballots were incorrect due to redistricting. It came to light when a candidate voted early, only to find that he was not on the ballot, and neither was another candidate.

So on election night, we got this instead of numbers:

“The resolution of the redistricting error was to deploy a corrected election database to the six affected precincts. Once all precincts have reported, the results from the six affected precincts can be merged with the unaffected precincts for state reporting.”

The county created two different data sets of votes to correct the problem, we were told, and the two sets of ballots had to be merged together by hand.

You might want to write that down because it is one of the better excuses to date.

One time, many years ago, election-night paralysis was blamed on humidity.

And as we have all been taught by our Northern newcomers, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”

The humidity caused paper ballots to jam in the counting machine.

Or so we were told.

Another time, the counting equipment didn’t work and replacement parts were supposedly being raced to Beaufort in speeding Highway Patrol cars.

One time, we were told the counting in Beaufort could not begin until all ballots were present, and they were still waiting to hear from Daufuskie Island.

Or something like that.

We envisioned the four votes from Daufuskie being ferried to Savannah by rowboat and transferred to the Pony Express, with an overnight stay at the livery stable in Hardeeville.

The AP bureau chief told me once that when he was trying to track down Democratic Party primary results from Beaufort County, he was told they weren’t available because the party chairman was out deep sea fishing.

This was in a conversation about Beaufort County always being a problem on election night.

After one long series of problems with voting or vote counting, the county election director told us we needed to walk a mile in her “moccasins.”

So add moccasins to your slumber party overnight bag in November.

Just know that Beaufort County has been the lost carrier pigeon on election night under a number of different staffs, election boards, and counting systems.

We could take a vote on the best excuses.

Never mind.

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.

This story was originally published June 19, 2022 at 5:00 AM.