Special election sees debut of new voting machines
By Samantha Lyles, Staff Writer, slyles@newsandpress.net
Darlington County held a Feb. 19 special City Council election in Hartsville, where Bobby McGee defeated Casey Copeland 149 to 32. McGee will take up the remaining term of retired District 6 Councilman William Shirley.
Aside from McGee’s landslide victory, the news of the day was all about the new equipment utilized to conduct the election.
At Hartsville’s two polling locations, voters participated in a trial of new machines that operate a little differently than the old models.
Darlington County Elections director Hoyt Campbell explained how they work. Voters sign in at their polling location and are given a special paper ballot, which they insert into a voting selection machine.
They choose their preferred candidates and answer ballot questions via touch screen and the results are thermally printed on their ballot. That paper ballot is then fed into a second machine, which tabulates the results electronically and secures the ballot under lock and key.
Rep. Robert Williams (House District 62) stopped in to watch the machines in use. Williams said he liked the two-step process, which gives voters extra time to review their choices and ensure their ballots are correct before submitting them.
“The first machine is just a ballot-marking device,” Campbell says, noting that candidates and referendum question responses are clearly marked.
This means the ballots are not open to subjective interpretation that results from “hanging chads” or partially shaded check boxes, which sometimes plagued the punch cards or “mark here” ballots of old.
Campbell says a key advantage of the new machines is that they provide an extra level of accountability with a physical paper trail, which could prove crucial if an election result is challenged.
“You get the tabulation of the votes in the computer, plus if we need to do a hand count we would have the paper ballots,” says Campbell.
Also, Campbell notes that each machine can be easily set up to meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements for voters with special needs.
He added that he would be pleased if the machines used in Darlington County were chosen for statewide use, since most voters in Hartsville seemed able to intuitively use them without trouble. Also, the voting machines currently in use across South Carolina are dated and slow. Campbell says they use Intel 80286 processors that, according to Wikipedia, were first introduced in 1982.
“The other machines are nearly at the end of their life. We were very fortunate in last year’s elections that we only had one machine go down, and they were able to download the information and save the votes. But other counties had a lot of problems with their machines. … They were late voting and had people lined up,” Campbell says.
Darlington County is the first to try these particular machines, which are being auditioned (along with other configurations) by the S.C. Board of Elections. In March, a state committee will choose which new voting machines to purchase and — pending approval by the General Assembly — these could be distributed and in use for the November 2019 elections.
