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Date Published: November 18, 2004
Jones challenges election
By LESLIE CANTU
Item Staff Writer
lesliec@theitem.com
In a protest filed Wednesday with the South Carolina
State Election Commission, Dickie Jones alleges that at least 111
more people voted in Sumter County than signed the poll books and
1,055 more ballots appear to have been cast than are accounted
for.
Jones, the Republican challenger for the state Senate
District 35 seat, lost to incumbent Sen. Phil Leventis, D-Sumter, by
86 votes — 15,540 to 15,454 — in the Nov. 2 general election. He is
asking the election commission to hold a new election for the state
Senate seat. The State Election Commission has until Dec. 11 to hold
a hearing on the protest.
The protest also outlines problems
with absentee ballots, fail-safe ballots, felons voting and empty
challenge ballot envelopes. The problems are significant enough to
have affected the election, the protest contends.
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JONES | |
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LEVENTIS | |
Leventis
said he doesn’t believe any irregularities occurred in the election.
If there were a few irregularities, he said, which happens
in every election, they didn’t benefit either candidate.
“I’ve looked at the challenge and the challenge doesn’t seem
to serve anyone but Dickie and some outside interests that are
backing him. ... In some cases it’s almost embarrassing. The
allegations just show a total lack of understanding of how the
election process works,” Leventis said.
The protest
challenges the 13 fail-safe votes cast in Lee County, saying that
fail-safe votes should not count for district races. Fail-safe votes
are for voters who have moved within a county but didn’t update
their addresses with the election commission before the
election.
According to the State Election Commission Web
site, a fail-safe voter may vote for federal, statewide and
countywide offices at his or her old precinct. If the voter decides
to go to the election commission office to update his or her
address, he or she can vote a full ballot at the election commission
office.
Lynn Fata, director of the Lee County Voter
Registration Office, said the 13 fail-safe ballots that were counted
were cast in her office on Election Day. The election commission
always waits to count those until the day of the provisional ballot
hearing, she said.
J Cabot Seth, Jones’ law partner and
representative, said there are definitely 111 more machine-counted
ballots than signatures in the Sumter County poll books. When voters
go to the polls, they must sign next to their names before receiving
a ballot.
“One hundred eleven are gosh, gee whiz, no doubt
about, more votes cast than voters signed in,” Seth said.
There’s no possibility of a mathematical error when
accounting for those 111 votes, Seth said.
The alleged 111
extra votes come from Delaine, Hampton Park, Horatio, Morris
College, Oakland Plantation 2, Oswego, Palmetto Park, Pinewood,
Rembert, Salterstown and Wilson Hall.
The 1,055 votes the
protest refers to could be explained by poll manager error when
calculating the votes at the end of the night. In the counting room
on election night, election commissioners ran some precincts through
the counting machine several times because the counting machine
reported a different number of ballots than the poll managers
reported. Some of the discrepancies were because poll managers
accounted for write-in ballots twice.
For example, the
protest says that at Swan Lake precinct, 214 more ballots than the
number of voters who signed their names were returned to the
courthouse for counting. In that same precinct, 213 write-in ballots
were cast.
On the other hand, the protest alleges that 110
more votes than voters present were cast at Morris College and 113
more votes than voters present were cast at Rembert, and those
precincts had only 21 write-in ballots each.
Pat Jefferson,
director of the Sumter County Voter Registration and Elections
Office, had not received a copy of the protest late Wednesday
afternoon and declined to comment.
“I’d rather see this in
writing first,” she said.
Sumter County Election Commission
Chairman Goliath Brunson Jr. also declined to comment until he has a
chance to read the protest.
The write-in campaign for Sumter
County auditor apparently created confusion for poll managers and
other election workers. Beside the possible mathematical errors, 23
absentee ballots were thrown out during the provisional ballot
hearing because they had gotten mixed up in the write-in room on
election night and election workers weren’t sure which precincts
they belonged to.
Without knowing which precinct each ballot
came from, election workers didn’t know if the voter had voted in
the District 35 race or the District 36 race, between state Sen.
John Land, D-Manning, and Republican challenger Bob
Gibbons.
The protest also alleges that 19 envelopes that
should have contained provisional ballots were empty, suggesting
that the provisional ballots were cast in the ballot box along with
the regular ballots.
The protest says that 106 fail-safe
votes in Sumter County were counted that shouldn’t have been. Seth
said there was nothing on the ballots to indicate whether they had
been cast at a precinct or at the courthouse.
The protest
also mentions three voters who apparently voted both absentee and at
a precinct, three felons who voted, and 18 fewer ballots than voters
returned from three precincts: Hillcrest, Mulberry and Shaw.
If the State Election Commission does call for a new
election, Seth said he hopes to see just as many voters come out as
voted on Election Day.
Leventis said a special election would
cost about $50,000 as well as the time of both voters and the
election commissions.
“Thirty-one thousand people spent as
much as two to three hours voting, and these folks would be asked to
come back again,” Leventis said.
It’s a shame that Jones
won’t concede the election, Leventis said. If Jones wants to get
involved, Leventis said, he would be happy to work with
him.
Contact Staff Writer Leslie Cantu at lesliec@theitem.com or
803-774-1250.
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November 22, 2004 
