Posted on Fri, Jun. 23, 2006

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Election officials face time crunch

By CLIF LeBLANC

cleblanc@thestate.com

Call it election-worker angst.

Delivery of computer databases for South Carolina’s first statewide computer voting in a runoff has taken longer than counties wanted, leaving them scrambling to get ready for Tuesday’s elections.

All counties are expected to have the information from Election Systems & Software Inc. by today, said state elections director Marci Andino.

“Counties are a little stressed,” Andino said Thursday.

None of the four counties contacted, including Richland and Lexington, said the delay threatened to postpone voting.

ES&S could not start preparing the computer discs until Saturday, when the election commission certified the results from the June 13 primaries.

ES&S spokesman Ken Fields said the company, which makes almost half the nation’s voting machines, is “working as hard as we can. The time frame has been short.”

Greenville County was concerned enough to dispatch an election official to drive half way to Columbia to meet the ES&S representative for the county’s disc, said Conway Belangia, Greenville elections director.

Without the county-specific databases, election workers cannot begin preparing electronic ballots, confirm the accuracy of the information and distribute voting machines, Belangia said.

“We were getting close to our drop-dead deadline,” he said. “In the election business, you can’t deal with 95 or 98 percent accuracy.”

He calculated the county needed two days to prepare the ballots and be ready to deliver voting machines Saturday.

That required Greenville workers to stay until about 12:30 a.m. Thursday to run tests and burn flash cards for the voting machines, Belangia said.

To be forced into deliveries of 500 machines to 139 precincts on Sunday or Monday would have been, “a logistical nightmare,” he said.

In Richland County, elections director Mike Cinnamon said his office got its data Thursday morning.

“At 4:30 (Wednesday afternoon) only 18 counties were receiving theirs,” Cinnamon said.

“We will get it done,” he said of preparations for Tuesday. “It just really has put us in a compressed time frame.”

His Lexington counterpart, Dean Crepes, said, “Everything’s fine. We’re rolling along.”

Andino does not fault ES&S, which she said has met the standards of its $34 million contract with the state to handle 11,500 voting machines in 2,000 precincts.

The difficulty, the state elections director said, lies with the tight, two-week timetable between primaries and runoffs.

Of the 10 states that hold runoffs, only South Carolina and South Dakota schedule them so closely, Andino said. The others wait five or six weeks.

“I wouldn’t judge them simply on the primary.”

Reach LeBlanc at (803) 771-8664.