SC never hired consultant to address Richland election problems after saying it would
After Richland County elections officials lost more than 1,000 ballots in 2018, state lawmakers voted to hire a consultant to make sure a similar problem did not arise in future elections.
Those lawmakers, representing Richland County, fought to include a provision in the state budget that called for the consultant’s hiring, overriding a veto from S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster, who said state taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for the expense.
But that consultant was never hired, and during South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary last month, county elections officials had another mishap, misplacing about 70 ballots.
The State Election Commission never hired a consultant because the state Legislature did not give the commission any additional money for the mandate, commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said.
State elections officials contacted several consultants and received bids ranging from $80,000 to $400,000, Whitmire said. Those estimates only included initial assessments of the issues that led to Richland County’s elections officials losing the ballots two years ago. The estimates did not include any follow ups or reports recommending how to improve the county’s elections procedures.
“We can absorb small things, but certainly not $100,000 or half a million dollars,” Whitmire said. “There was no consultant.”
S.C. Rep. Todd Rutherford, a Columbia Democrat who pushed to add the hiring of the consultant in the budget, said state election officials should have used money from their budget to make the hire.
“The State Election Commission is part of the state, and they are funded out of the state budget,” Rutherford said. “It is not an unfunded mandate when it comes from the state and you are the state. It is simply a mandate.”
Rutherford said hiring a consultant for Richland County would have stopped the primary ballots from being lost.
“I think had they hired a consultant, not only would the 70 ballots not be lost, but we would have been in a level of understanding of where the exact problems are,” Rutherford said.
The state Election Commission did ask for $500,000 in their annual budget request to hire the consultant lawmakers wanted in 2019. But the agency’s request was not included in either the governor’s executive budget or the House Ways and Means Committee’s budget.
Rutherford said state elections officials never asked him personally for the funds.
“If their way of asking is by telepathy, then that doesn’t work,” Rutherford said. “They never came to speak to me about it.”
Though the agency did not hire a consultant for Richland County, the S.C. Election Commission retrained the county’s elections and voter registration employees in an effort to improve the “culture and knowledge base” at the local elections office over the last year, Whitmire said.
The elections board also made a job offer to hire a new elections and voter registration director. If she accepts the job, Tammy Smith will become the office’s fourth director in the last year.
The Richland County Election Commission has been under fire for years, ever since its mishandling of the 2012 election, plagued by a lack of enough voting machines that left voters waiting in line for hours at some polling places and misplaced ballots.
In early 2019, the Richland elections board admitted it failed to count more than 1,000 votes in the previous November election. In mid-February, the county elections board was criticized by S.C. Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a freshman lawmaker and outspoken critic of government in Richland County and at the State House. The Columbia Democrat called out a board member for not completing legally required training for the job.
The next day, McMaster fired the entire Richland County election commission board. And in May, the agency’s new board voted to fire Richland County’s elections and voter registration director Rokey Suleman.
Despite the office losing 70 absentee ballots during last month’s presidential primary, Harpootlian said Richland County elections officials are making improvements.
“Losing a ballot is unacceptable. Losing 70, obviously, is unacceptable, but it’s not a thousand found a month later,” Harpootlian said. “So they’re getting better, but there shouldn’t be a single ballot lost.”
Blame going around
Since the board was ousted last year, Harpootlian speculated that elections issues could stem from the staff.
He suggested that Richland County Council may need to provide more funding to the elections office. Rutherford echoed that suggestion.
“My biggest concern is that they figure out what happened,” Harpootlian said. “They have problems with absentee ballots, and they (should) address it before the June primary.”
McMaster blamed the election mishap on Richland County’s legislators, who pick members of the county election commission, for a pattern of “apparent incompetence.”
“This is squarely on the desk of our Richland County legislative delegation, and they need to see there are plenty of very able people who are competent and know how to do those things,” McMaster said days after the primary. “They ought to choose those people.”
Defending the county elections board, Harpootlian said some members were nationally renowned elections experts. Issues with elections in Richland County aren’t going to be fixed over night, he added.
Rutherford criticized McMaster for exacerbating the problem by firing the board last year, “leaving no institutional knowledge whatsoever.”
“What we are experiencing now is a simple continuation of the exact problems that should have been fixed piecemeal, and hopefully would have been fixed right now, instead of the governor throwing the baby out with the bath water and us starting over from zero,” Rutherford said.
