Why some Richland voters may still be waiting on their absentee ballot
The vast majority of Richland County voters who requested absentee ballots should expect to receive them in the mail any day.
A technical snag discovered earlier this month briefly delayed the vendor tasked with mailing the requested ballots to voters, but as of Wednesday afternoon, nearly 97% of absentee ballots in Richland County had been issued, according to South Carolina Election Commission data.
Alexandria Stephens, the county’s director of voter registration and elections, said the vendor had intended to mail out absentee ballots by Monday, Oct. 5, but was unable to meet the deadline after discovering an error in the data file the county provided them.
It’s not clear whether the county or the vendor was at fault, but Stephens told the county voter registration and elections board Friday that the issue resulted in a three-day delay in getting absentee ballots mailed out to voters.
That delay, which extended what had already been the relatively late issuance of absentee ballots due to a special election runoff for a Richland County Council seat, stirred confusion and raised concerns among voters still stewing over the long lines and ballot problems that plagued the June primary.
“Richland county election commission. Where is my mail in ballot I requested two months ago? You are the worst,” Robert Rikard, a local attorney and former Democratic State Senate candidate, tweeted Thursday night.
At that point, Richland County, whose vendor had only begun issuing absentee ballots earlier in the day, had mailed out just 11% of the requested absentee ballots, according to Election Commission data. By comparison, 86% of absentee ballots requested statewide had been issued by then.
Stephens encouraged Richland County voters to be patient and advised the elections board Friday that the remainder of absentee ballots would be pushed out in the coming days and said anyone who requested an absentee ballot should receive it by the end of this week.
State Election Commission data show the county has successfully ramped up its ballot mailings since late last week, reaching 63,358 absentee ballots issued — 96.7% of those requested — by noon Wednesday.
In the meantime, as Richland County voters have grown tired of waiting for their ballots to arrive by mail, many have chosen to cast absentee in-person votes instead.
More than 18,200 Richland County voters have voted absentee in-person since Oct. 5, when early in-person voting started, according to SEC data.
It’s not known how many of those are voters who originally requested an absentee ballot by mail, but became discouraged by the delay in receiving their ballot and decided to vote in-person.
A far greater proportion of the early votes cast in Richland County have been in-person rather than by mail compared to other South Carolina counties.
As of Monday, roughly 5% of votes cast in Richland County had been mailed in compared to about 42% of votes cast statewide, according to State Election Commission data.
While elections officials have encouraged voters who requested absentee ballots to wait until at least the end of this week before giving up on their ballots arriving and voting absentee in-person, there is nothing to prevent a voter who requested a ballot by mail to now vote absentee in-person.
Since all votes are logged, a voter who requested an absentee ballot by mail but votes absentee in-person before they receive that ballot will not be able to vote a second time if or when they later receive the mail ballot they requested.
Rikard, the Columbia lawyer, said Tuesday that he had yet to receive his absentee ballot and had not voted absentee in-person because he hadn’t known it was permissible to do so while his mail ballot was still outstanding.
“It’s unbelievable that in 2020 it is so incredibly difficult to vote,” he said. “And that, as a lawyer, the rules are so byzantine it is hard to decipher sometimes what is allowed and what is not allowed.”
This story was originally published October 13, 2020 at 12:52 PM.