Questions Remain About Richland Election Mess After Hearing

After nearly three weeks of conjecture, the public was hoping to get some answers about what went wrong on Election Day in Richland County. It got some, but those answers yielded even more questions.

Before a packed room in the Gressette Building, leadership from the Richland County Election Commission and the Richland County Office of Elections and Voter Registration testified in front of the County’s Legislative Delegation on Monday.

Both Liz Crum, who heads the Commission, and Lillian McBride, the Executive Director of Elections and Voter Registration apologized to the delegation and to the public for the long lines on Election Day.

Neither Crum nor McBride testified under oath during the session, which was labeled a “fact-finding” hearing by delegation chair Sen. Darrell Jackson (D-21). There was also no talk of personnel changes or of hiring and firing. Any time members of the delegation attempted to steer the three-and-a-half hour hearing in that direction Jackson interceded.

Indeed, anyone hoping that McBride would resign or be asked to resign was quickly disabused of such a notion as the questions she faced were more supportive than critical.

According to McBride, the main reason that there were not enough machines at polling stations was due to a simple error on a spreadsheet, which is explained HERE.

The most confrontational moment of the afternoon did not even involve McBride. It came when Sen. Joel Lourie (D-22) said he was “offended” by statements from Rep. Nathan Ballentine (R-71) that insinuated the hiring processes lacked transparency.

The session opened with Crum providing background and explaining that the County had never encountered difficulties in running an election. Last year, the Voter Registration office and the Election office merged into one organization. That transition apparently did not go smoothly. After the merger, longtime Director of Elections Mike Cinnamon stepped down in the summer of 2011. Despite having more than three decades of experience running elections, Cinnamon was not asked to stay on even as a consultant, according to the testimony of both McBride and Crum. Citing personnel matters, they would not elaborate the terms or circumstances of Cinnamon’s departure. But a memo from September 20, 2011 said that the newly formed Elections and Voter Registration “does not see the need for outside contract work.”

During the testimony it was confirmed that the County had 970 machines in its possession, 45 of which were not working, mostly due to problems with the batteries. But only 628 of the remaining machines were used on Election Day, meaning about 300 sat unused.

Duncan Buell, a USC professor in Computer Science who studies elections and provided a report to the delegation, told Patch the issues in Richland County were unprecedented in his experience. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Buell said. “My program had to be changed to new settings to analyze the data.”

The most pointed questions to McBride came from Ballentine, Reps. James Smith (D-72), Todd Rutherford (D-74) and Mia Butler Garrick (R-79).

Smith said that the delegation and its constituents need to have confidence that elections can be run without incident, unlike what happened this year. Smith also wondered why no poll workers noticed that they had fewer machines in their precincts than they did for the last election. Or why no one noticed hundreds of voting machines remaining idle on Election Day.

Rutherford wanted to know who was responsible for filling out the spreadsheet that is being blamed for the long lines but was prevented from pursuing that line of questioning by Jackson.

Near the end of the session, Garrick said to McBride, pointedly, "I have not seen any real effort to hold yourself accountable."

Members of the delegation repeatedly asked McBride what corrections she had made to procedures in light of the debacle, but she was short on specifics and reverted to apologizing for the long lines. McBride explained that she also is still seeking answers to many of the questions raised at the hearing.

Among the questions still unanswered is who is responsible for the maintenance of the voting machines, which are several years old. When the Elections Office and Voter Registration Office merged in 2011 and new job descriptions were created, no one person was given the duty of maintaining or tracking the maintenance of the machines, according to the minutes from a meeting on June 30, 2011. At the same meeting, it was noted that in the budget “the money is available to repair the voting machines.”

But at Monday’s hearing there were no details about how maintenance records were kept if at all. 69 of the 628 machines in use broke down at some point on Election Day.

Crum said that the Commission is in the process of investigating what went wrong and that Steve Hamm, an attorney retained by the commission, hopes to have a report within 30 days.

After the session—which lasted as long as some voters waited in line on Election Day—Rep. Smith acknowledged that questions remain. “I wished we had some more answers today, but I know that Steve Hamm will provide a thorough report on what happened,” Smith said. “I think the whole delegation will use that to see how much confidence we have in Ms. McBride moving forward.”

Sen. Jackson invited members of the delegation to hold public forums in their own district, a point which Garrick contested, saying this is a “county-wide issue.” But Jackson demurred and said he has no plans to hold forums in his Senate District and that if he did, they would be about the Department of Revenue records breach and not about the lines on Election Day.

The delegation’s next scheduled meeting is Dec. 6.

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