Election Employees Saw 'Train Wreck Coming'

A person familiar with the way elections are run in Richland County said that several months prior to Election Day it was clear to him that “a train wreck was coming.”

Voters waited for up to six hours in lines at polling places throughout the county.

The person spoke to Patch on the condition of anonymity.

He said that the problems began almost immediately after the Elections Office and Office of Voter Registration were merged in the Summer of 2011 and Lillian McBride was put in charge of the new organization.

The source said that after the offices were merged, the previous Director of Elections, Mike Cinnamon—who had over 35 years of experience of working on elections—offered to help McBride transition to her new position, but was rebuffed. A memo dated September 20, 2011 confirms as much. It stated the Commission that oversees the Elections office did “not see the need for outside contract work,” which presumably included Cinnamon’s services. During testimony on Monday before the Richland County Legislative Delegation, McBride confirmed that she did not see a reason to ask for Cinnamon’s help.

Patch spoke to Cinnamon shortly after Election Day and he declined to characterize his relationship with McBride or the terms of his departure from the Elections office.

The source Patch spoke with said there was surprise among longtime poll workers when McBride was put in charge, because when she ran the Voter Registration Office, “it was a total disaster. That’s what’s being overshadowed during all this and no one is talking about it.”

When the source was asked why he thought McBride was put in charge, he said, “It’s obvious she had political connections.”

The source said the contrast between Cinnamon and McBride was striking. Cinnamon kept a detailed history of each precinct and knew every poll supervisor.

“He was out and about on Election Day. He wanted to know what was happening so he could make adjustments for the next election. He understood how to tap into people’s knowledge. I didn’t see anything like that from McBride,” the source said.

Under Cinnamon, poll managers communicated with him whenever there was a technical problem. That changed under McBride who, the source said, told poll workers to tell technicians about problems with the machines.

The source had experience working with the machines and said he’s not surprised there were problems with them.

“They are getting old and the technicians didn’t see any work being done on them,” he said.

The source said that when a machine breaks down at a polling station it is “Red-Tagged” and when the machines are collected after voting has completed technicians can tell which machines malfunctioned. They were then sent to ES & S, the manufacturer, for repair and were logged and tracked accordingly. Based on his experience, the source said that under McBride, he saw no evidence that inventory or maintenance of the machines was regularly kept.

The source recounted a visit by a technician this summer to the warehouse on Monticello Road and saw dozens of broken voting machines. During her testimony on Monday, McBride said that the major problems with the machines were broken batteries. But the source, who has years of experience working on the machines, said that a dysfunctional battery won’t necessarily stop a machine from functioning. The most common problem with the machines, he said, is the screens.

Spencer Brown, a poll location technician of eight years, said he was given a few precincts to service shortly before the election. He was unaware if every precinct had been checked.

Another poll technician refused to answer questions about the election. 

McBride blamed the shortage of machines on an unnamed employee who put the wrong number on a spreadsheet. But the source said there should have been a fail-safe plan in place that would have caught the error on the spreadsheet.

He also said that in previous elections McBride had mismanaged both the machines and the staff. “There were too many people at some precincts and in others not enough,” he said. “In past elections (under McBride) there were times when there were eight machines at a precinct and less than 100 voters turned out. That shouldn't happen.”

On Election Day, Anthony Wilson, a poll manager at an Earlewood voting precinct said he ordered more machines than were delivered.

The number of machines he received, three, was typical of a smaller election instead of a presidential election, Wilson said. 

Election law requires one machine for every 250 voters. But according to the source, it’s not as simple as taking the number of register voters in a precinct and dividing by 250 to determine how many machines should be deployed.

“It’s more art than science,” he said. “Cinnamon managed the data on all the precincts and he used it to plan for every election.”

“I didn’t see that happen with McBride.”

The source said he did not work for any candidate or party, but like many people who work on elections, he participated because he believes that voting is the essence of democracy.

“I have no axe to grind against the people who ran this election,” the source said. “They’re nice people. They’re just incompetent.”

The Richland County Election Commission has a public meeting scheduled for today at 4 p.m.

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