How will SC vote if coronavirus persists? Absentee ballots could crush local offices
State and local officials say they are having to rethink how South Carolina will conduct elections this year as South Carolinians across the state continue to self-quarantine and avoid large groups due to the spread of the coronavirus.
Should officials recommend self-quarantining through June when voters head to their precincts to vote in the June primary, local elections offices likely will be inundated with hundreds of thousands of absentee or mail-in ballots, said Chris Whitmire, spokesman for the state’s Election Commission.
Worsening the problem, local elections boards might not have the resources to handle that influx, said Duncan Buell, a member of the Richland County Board of Elections.
“I think there is a need for serious rethinking of how we conduct the November election, and in our case, the June primary,” he said.
About 500,000 absentee or mail-in votes were cast statewide in the 2016 general election, Whitmire said. And months before coronavirus concerns spread across the state, Whitmire said officials were expecting to see record at least 600,000 mail-in ballots.
Now, Whitmire said, that number is expected to be much higher.
Buell and other countrywide elections officials have now called on Congress by letter through the Brennen Center for Justice to spend more money on local elections systems in the next coronavirus aid package to support what could be a spike in absentee or mail-in ballots especially if concerns over COVID-19 persist into June.
Using South Carolina’s old electronic voting system, calculating results from absentee voting would have been much easier, said Buell. But with the state’s new paper ballot system, which requires elections officials to scan in each ballot, it would take substantially more time to calculate elections results, Buell said.
In Richland County alone, Buell said that scanning could take up to 12 hours. That would not include the time it would take to count and sort ballots and open envelopes, and if thousands of people also opt to mail in ballots, it would take even longer to count votes, according to Buell.
Richland County has had issues in the past dealing with counting absentee ballots.
“That’s going to complicate things even more,” said Buell. “There’s going to be an overwhelming person time effort that goes into handling all that paper. I think we do need to be concerned. ... I think we need to plan and we need to plan now for how that number of paper can be handled. We need to get the answers right.”
State elections officials say they also are worried about whether they could find enough poll workers to work on upcoming election days. Most poll workers are in the high-risk category when it comes to being exposed to COVID-19, Whitmire said.
Officials also wonder if places that typically host polling stations — schools, churches or even nursing homes — would be open to hosting while the coronavirus continues to spread, Whitmire said.
The S.C. Election Commission is working with Gov. Henry McMaster and state lawmakers to consider several other ways elections can be conducted while voters are advised not to gather in large groups, Whitmire said.
Those options include opening up absentee voting to all voters or postponing the June primary. Postponing a primary, which would have to be approved by the S.C. Legislature, has previously occurred in 1992 and 1994, Whitmire said.
State officials also are considering removing the witness requirement on absentee ballots, allowing voters with disabilities and who are first responders to print a ballot online, opening early voting centers and letting voters submit absentee voting application online, Whitmire said.
South Carolina also could transition to a vote by mail system, which other states — for example, Colorado — already use, Whitmire said. Under that system, elections officials would mail all registered voters a ballot, which they could fill out and send back.
But states that have transitioned to that system spent years planning ahead of the change, Whitmire said. And voting via mail in ballots is more expensive than having voters cast ballots in person.
“Certainly, implementing that in months would be a huge undertaking,” Whitmire said. “All these are sort of options on the table. I don’t think any one of them (on their own) are an answer to the big (concern).”
“It will be new territory for election officials.”
This story was originally published March 24, 2020 at 3:34 PM.
