Richland County selects new elections director. Can she whip the office into shape?
After almost a year, Richland County is close to having a new elections director.
The county elections board voted Thursday to offer the job to Tammy Smith, currently the deputy elections director in Wilson County, Tennessee.
Smith would be the latest person to hold what has become a revolving door position, with seven people serving in the position in the past seven years. The county has struggled with long lines and lost ballots in past elections.
“She’s ready to hit the ground running,” said board vice chair Craig Plank. “She’ll be able to watch things with meticulous detail.”
Smith would be the first full-time director since Rokey Suleman was fired last May after two years heading the department. That decision came after Richland County failed to count more than 1,000 ballots in the 2018 general election, and the entire election board was fired by Gov. Henry McMaster.
Current board chair Charles Austin said Smith’s biggest challenge will be restoring staff morale and public confidence in the office.
“The staff has maintained as best they could the confidence to do the jobs they have been assigned,” Austin said. “But there have been challenges that have dimmed the confidence among the voting public.”
Speaking to The State, Smith said she likes that Richland County poses “a challenge,” although she can’t tell from the outside how some of the problems might arise.
“I’m sure a lot of them are checks and balances,” she said. “When you’re running an election, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be transparent. There should be checks and balances on everything you do.”
After Suleman’s ouster, deputy director Thad Hall briefly took the reins, followed by Terry Graham, who served as an interim director following a stint in the same job in Chester County. Graham was a candidate for the permanent position, but then Richland County had another ballot-handling issue, when 70 ballots were not counted in last week’s Democratic primary.
“I just feel bad for something I promised the voters of Richland County,” Graham told The State at the time. “I just feel like I didn’t deliver.”
Plank said Smith’s hire will hopefully overcome the “bumps and bruises from the last decade, including 2018 and the most recent election.”
But Smith wants to have a “positive impact” on the people who work in the elections office as well.
“I want them to come in and love what they’re doing,” she said.
Richland County’s election office is still working to recover from the disastrous 2012 election. A presidential race and a contentious penny sales tax referendum brought voters out to polling places that year, but many were left waiting in line for as long as seven hours as precincts dealt with a shortage of voting machines and poll workers.
Then-director Lillian McBride was demoted over that fiasco and eventually left the department. Jasper Salmond filled in as a part-time director after McBride’s resignation. Howard Jackson was fired in February 2014 after what he described as a “power struggle” with the board over staff changes. And Samuel Selph retired from the job in March 2017 after a series of clashes with County Council over his agency’s funding.
Last year, then-deputy director Hall briefly filled in for Suleman after his departure but left two months later for a job in Arizona.
This story was originally published March 6, 2020 at 12:06 PM.
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