Dorchester hand counting 14,600 absentee ballots that SC voting machines couldn’t read
Dorchester County, which was unable to count about 14,600 mail-in absentee ballots Tuesday night due to a printing error, has a phalanx of people hand counting the ballots Wednesday, officials said.
State Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said about 40 people were working to hand count the ballots early Wednesday afternoon and that more would be joining them throughout the day. There is currently no estimate of when they will be finished, he said.
Dorchester County elections director Todd Billman said Tuesday that officials discovered the ballot printing error Tuesday morning, after beginning to open the ballot envelopes and realizing they could not be read by ballot scanning machines due to incorrect timing marks.
Despite the delay, Billman and the Election Commission have reassured voters that all votes will eventually be counted.
“We want everyone to know that this will be an open process, we’ll keep you guys notified along the whole way of how we’re doing,” Billman said Tuesday. “I’m very thankful that we have a lot of workers here ready to make sure that your vote counts and that your vote is counted accurately.”
The printing error affected the approximately 14,600 absentee ballots that were mailed to voters. If all of those ballots were returned — as of Monday night, about 1,100 had not been returned — it would mean about 20% of the votes cast in Dorchester County had yet to be counted.
The county had contemplated re-printing timing marks on the ballot, which help the scanners orient and read a voter’s selections, but decided instead to “duplicate” the ballots, a manual process.
Duplication, Whitmire said, is a standard process used when a ballot cannot be read.
A three-member team works to duplicate the ballot.
One person reads the original ballot, another marks a replacement ballot using a voting machine and a third person observes, he said.
When the ballot is printed out, they confirm it matches the original ballot and then move to the next ballot. The original ballots are maintained so they can be matched with the duplicate ballots, Whitmire said.
“They’ll continue until they’ve done that with all of the ballots,” he said. “Throughout the process, once they get a batch of duplicate ballots done, they will scan those and do incremental reports.”
As of 1:20 p.m., the Election Commission’s results website was reporting that 126 of the roughly 14,600 mail-in votes had been counted.
Votes must be certified by Friday, but Whitmire said that in this case ensuring all votes are counted accurately is more important than meeting the deadline. He said that certification has been delayed on some occasions.