Aiken County says ‘failed’ election audit was software glitch. How were votes recounted?

Despite initially certifying the wrong election results and failing its audit, all votes in Aiken County have been accurately counted and certified, despite a software glitch, state and county election officials said.

South Carolina Election Commission spokesperson John Michael Catalano said some of the vote totals in Aiken were incorrectly counted in the wrong voting-method category, but the total votes for each candidate were correct.

“It was the makeup of the vote, and it was basically absentee votes were showing up in election day totals,” Catalano said.

Catalano said no other county has failed an audit since 2020 when South Carolina changed the voting system process to include paper ballots.

“It wasn’t really a failed audit ... I mean, I guess that is one way of putting it, but it was basically the audit that they performed let them know that, hey, there were issues with their results reporting that they needed to figure out before they could officially certify,” Catalano said.

South Carolina voters cast their ballot through early voting, mail-in absentee or in person on election day. The vote totals reported Election Night are unofficial until the counties certify them and send the data to the state. Certifying is a process where election officials review all votes cast and ensure they were counted accurately. The deadline for the counties to send the certified results to the state is the Friday after the election.

Dana Burden, registration and elections director for Aiken County, confirmed that initially the county had failed its audit, but as of 4 p.m. Tuesday, they recertified the votes and passed the audit

Burden said they have to do a hand-count audit following the statewide election, and the numbers were not matching Friday. The office had certified and believed the results were correct, until she was notified late Friday afternoon that the audit had failed.

Burden said she worked all weekend to rerun all the ballots and recount everything to ensure the numbers were right, finding it it was a software glitch, she said.

Every total number was off by at least 6 or 7, she said. When they were inputting results, the information was not being dropped into the correct “bucket,” she said. When the election data is loaded into the system, they do so on a thumb drive. She said some of the absentee counts went into election day totals, so that was throwing off the number.

This did not change the results at all, she emphasized.

“It was really not a big deal,” Burden said.

The office completed the recertification Tuesday, she said.

“The purpose of an audit is to make sure that truly, every vote has counted, and that’s what it’s for,” Burden said. “Even though it was still right, I would have rather did what I did this weekend and recounted everything just to make sure, versus just hoping it was right. Nobody in the state that works elections is going to do that. We don’t hope it’s right. We make sure it’s right.”

After counties certify, they send the results off to the state election commission for them to certify as well, which happened on Thursday morning, the deadline for the state to make all the races official except for the ones that went to a recount.