With a nearly 51% voter turn out in Horry County with 1.72 million people casting their votes for the midterm election, election office workers say they haven’t seen a turn out like this one in years.
Director Sandy Martin says they are in need of a couple hundred more voting machines, more poll workers, and a new voting system entirely in order to make for a smoother process for the presidential election in 2020.
“We’ve had the same machines since 2005, we hope they replace the system because if they don’t then we really are going to have to revamp it.” Martin said.
With 700 workers at 125 poll stations across the county, Martin says Tuesday’s midterm election showed they’ll need even more workers for the 2020 election.
“Especially helping with curbside voters, we seemed to have an awful lot of curbside voters yesterday.” Martin said.
Horry County resident, Ronald Campbell says he and his wife had to visit their polling location four times before the line was reasonable.
“The lines were just so far out that Patricia and I couldn’t do that for that amount of time, but we were determined to vote.” said Campbell.
But, he says he didn’t end up being able to cast a vote because he changed his address at the DMV and the information wasn’t updated with the polling office.
“He said you need to go to the other place, but I said ‘they’re closed now?'” said Campbell. “They tried to be very helpful but it just didn’t work.”
