Why You Waited - Employee Wrote Wrong Number On Spreadsheet

During testimony today at the Gressette Building on the Election Day fiasco in Richland County, Lillian McBride, Executive Director of Elections and Voter Registration, said the reason why not enough voting machines were placed in precincts may have been due to a simple clerical error.

According to McBride, an employee put the wrong number in the far right column (written in red) into the spreadsheet pictured above. The employee thought that column was for the number of Personal Electronic Ballots (PEBs) that were supposed to go to each precinct. It was supposed to indicate the number of machines.

A PEB is a voter tracking tool that allows poll workers to know when voting has started and stopped. Liz Crum, Director of the Richland County Election Commission, said that there is typically one PEB for every two voting machines.

McBride said that as machines were being dispersed to the precincts, workers saw the number in the far right column and did not realize it was erroneous. McBride did not say who wrote the numbers in or why they were written by hand.

The error meant that even though the County Elections office had 935 functioning machines in its posession, only about 628 went out.

Note: A PEB is also pictured above and identified as such.

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