FLORENCE, SC (WBTW) – Some voting results trickled in later than expected on Tuesday night due to machine glitches in a few parts of the state.
State election officials say it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, and since there are 13,000 voting machines in the state, some of them were bound to malfunction.
A few counties in the Pee Dee, including Marlboro and Florence, experienced equipment malfunctions. In Marlboro County, the motherboard on one of the computer’s died and caused about a two-hour delay. And in Florence county, a key piece of hardware, called the tabulator, stopped working and forced election officials to count the votes with flash card data.
David Alford with the Florence County Voters’ Office says they counted 25 precincts electronically before they started experiencing connectivity issues with the tabulator. They tried to reboot it several times but all attempts were unsuccessful. That’s when they went to ‘Plan B.’
“The flash card data also collects the vote data and saves it when the machine closes at the end of the evening. So the same vote data is on a little two-by-two flash card. It is a secondary backup and actually the voting machines have three built-in memories that you can collect data from,” said Alford.
Alford also described the system as a self-contained item that wasn’t connected to internet.
“So, you can’t call an IT department and have them log into your system and see what’s causing the problem. I was on an island by myself,” Alford explained.
Election officials in Florence said they don’t believe any votes were lost or unaccounted for. All votes will be reviewed for certification at 10 a.m. on Thursday.
