By Robert Kittle
(COLUMBIA, SC)
A record turnout in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary Saturday caused long lines in some precincts, but, “We didn’t see any widespread problems,” says Chris Whitmire, State Election Commission spokesman.
Some people waited to vote for more than an hour in Anderson County, where one precinct had only one voting machine. Whitmire says, “You should have more than one machine. One goes down, obviously you want to have at least one for a backup. So I don’t know the details of what happened there.”
In 2008, the turnout in the state’s Republican presidential primary was about 19.5 percent, Whitmire says, while it was 25 percent this time.
If there were lines, another cause is that counties cannot use all of their voting machines. With two primaries only one week apart, there’s not enough time to reconfigure all of the machines, so counties typically use half of their machines for the Republican primary and the other half for the Democratic.
But Whitmire says the Election Commission is asking counties to take steps before Saturday. “A county could take some of the Republican primary machines, reconfigure them for the Democratic primary and have some extras on standby, if they got in one of those situations where machines didn’t open on election morning or poll managers couldn’t open them, or you had such tremendous turnout in a particular precinct where you have lines that they could have even more extra machines to deploy,” he says.
He says turnout should also be heavy for the Democratic primary because there have been more absentee ballots this time than in 2008.
