|
Date Published: November 3, 2004
Uncertainty reigns
Write-in ballots delay tallying
|
Chris Moore / The Item
Laura Morris, foreground, and Linda Tobias examine
write-in ballots Tuesday evening at the Sumter County
Courthouse. |
| |
|
|
 |
By KRISTA PIERCE
Item Staff Writer
kristap@theitem.com
At 1 a.m. Wednesday, Sumter election officials were still
hours away from posting accurate vote totals because thousands of
write-in ballots had not been counted.
"Certainly nobody has
a comfortable enough margin in any race to not be affected by what's
in this room," said Sumter County Democratic Party representative
Doug Griffin. "The election is still in this room."
With 12
precincts left uncounted at 12:45 a.m. today, officials were
reporting more than 5,000 write-in ballots. Complicating the matter
were an estimated 5,000 absentee ballots, many of which also
contained write-in ballots.
Some officials estimated as many
as 6,000 to 8,000 write-in ballots were cast, most for Jomarie
Crocker, who lost the Democratic party nomination to challenger
Lauretha McCants in the primary in June and eventually left the
party and campaigned as a write-in candidate for the auditor's
office.
Indeed, candidates in every race, from sheriff to
coroner to state Senate, couldn't be sure the numbers they were
seeing posted on large sheets of paper in the courthouse hallway
were any indication of which candidate had actually received the
most votes. Until the thousands of write-in ballots were counted,
candidates were left to wait and wonder.
"Our candidates
know what's going on," said Jimmy Byrd, chairman of the Sumter
County Republican Party. "I've been talking with them. They know
we're going to be here for a long time."
As hundreds of
ballots poured into a small employee break room designated as the
"write-in room," two election workers tried to devise a way to count
the ballots by hand, planning to tally votes by making hatch marks
under a particular candidate's name on large computer-generated
graphs.
Workers said write-in ballots, which are attached to
the regular punch card ballot containing votes for other offices,
could not be entered into the vote-counting machine. The reason,
they said, was that some voters had written in a vote for Crocker,
but had also either punched their card for McCants or had voted a
straight Democratic-party ticket. Write-in votes override punch
votes, but running those ballots through the vote counting machine
would have given a vote to McCants in addition to Crocker.
At 9:45 p.m., more than two hours after ballots began
arriving at the courthouse, election officials called in
reinforcements. Earle "Keith" Shultz, a commissioner on the Sumter
County Election Commission, tried to gain control over the
situation.
"I want this to happen tonight," he said. "Find
me seven people from each party."
At the same time, Carol Ann
Rogers, vice chairman of the Sumter County Election Commission,
received a call back from a state election official who told her the
ballots that did not have a vote for McCants or for a straight
Democratic ticket, could be counted by the machine.
At that
point, eight workers, some of whom had been pulled from the
courthouse hallways, began reviewing ballots, separating those that
contained punches for McCants or for the straight Democratic
ticket.
At midnight, the volunteers quietly continued their
work. Small stacks of ballots that contained votes for McCants and
Crocker were set aside, bundled together by precinct. Others were
also separated by precinct and put aside to be counted by the
machine.
Moments later, Shultz came out of the room into the
hallway and asked the crowd to quiet down, saying it was getting
more difficult for workers to concentrate on separating the ballots
as the crowd grew louder.
Byrd said the process could have
been handled much more efficiently. He was reluctant to point a
finger of blame, but as news of the write-in debacle spread through
the courthouse halls, many questioned why the election commission
didn't have a better plan in place.
Goliath Brunson Jr.,
chairman of the Sumter County Election Commission, said the
confusion was a result of incorrect information given to election
workers.
"We thought the votes had to remain intact because
if it was separated, it would invalidate the ballot," he said.
Brunson had no answers to questions concerning why only two
workers were on hand to count the write-in ballots.
"I
thought we had a team put together," he said. "I thought there was a
write-in room team."
He also declined to speculate whether
the use of electronic voting machines, which the commission voted
down in July, would have made the process of counting write-in
ballots any easier.
Byrd, on the other hand, was quick to
point out that with the electronic voting system, vote totals for
other races would have already been counted even if someone chose to
cast a vote for a write-in candidate.
"They would already
know everything and I would be on the way home," Byrd said. Instead,
dozens of people milled about the courthouse hallways waiting for
updated totals. Among them was Jomarie Crocker, who said she had no
idea the write-in ballots were causing such chaos.
"I can't
believe they only had two people," she said. "It's been going on for
months ... But write-ins are so rare. Maybe they didn't realize it
would be so big."
E-mail
to a friend Previous
Page |
November 8, 2004 
