At first glance, it looks like a peanut shelling factory, with hundreds of people milling about under a long, low warehouse, some grouped around tables with their heads bent to the task. But what they're passing around are long sheets of paper with small black marks that will soon become votes.
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Travis Doss, assistant director for the Richmond County Board of Elections, sorts through provisional ballot bags. Those ballots will be counted within the next few weeks.
Andrew Davis Tucker/Staff
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Chris Wilson (left) and Franklin Walker unload voting machines at Election Central in Augusta. Local officials said Election Day went smoothly.
Annette M. Drowlette/Staff
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Richmond County Board of Elections workers faced a record 79 percent turnout Tuesday night but managed to wade through the onslaught of voters without a hitch. Columbia County also saw a record turnout, with 82 percent. Aiken County had 63,555 ballots cast, with 500 to 600 provisional ballots still to be reviewed Friday.
"This is a record in terms of number of ballots cast," said Stuart Bedenbaugh, the executive director of the Aiken County Registration and Elections Commission, although the 78 percent turnout probably is not.
Inside Election Central in Augusta on Tuesday night, what one poll worker called "organized chaos" revealed itself to be a surprisingly smooth operation that handled counting old-fashioned paper absentee ballots and uploading memory chips from electronic voting machines.
"We've got four or five simultaneous operations going on Election Night," said Lynn Bailey, the executive director of the board of elections.
A couple of hours after the polls had closed, a long line of bleary-eyed poll managers lined up at a long table clutching blue tote bags and cardboard suitcases that included what looked like a bank bag with the voting machine chips inside. As they passed down the table at the facility in south Augusta, election workers documented what they turned in. The bank bag went across the room to a standalone computer, where the chips were fed one by one into a slot to get their results.
After each polling place was processed, the results were copied onto a thumbdrive, a tiny portable computer drive, which was then passed over the cubicle wall to a tech who uploaded those results to the Board of Elections computer. Some results already had been sent in by modem from the polling sites.
"It's a lot easier," said Leon McKay, precinct manager for Jamestown Community Center since 1984. "It's a lot less paperwork. And to me, it is also better accountability."
Nearby sat bins of the real paperwork, as scores of election workers grouped around long tables working through sheaves of absentee ballots. After the 5,208 ballots are opened, audited and recorded, they are double-checked at one station, then passed out to the tables, where they are counted again before being fed through an optical scan machine to tabulate the votes.
If the machine rejects it, the ballot is passed to the vote review table, where six people, some appointed by a judge, others nominated by the parties, try to decipher what the voter was thinking.
One absentee voter accidentally circled "no" on the same-sex marriage amendment and tried to amend his error by writing "errow" next to it. Unsure of the name of the candidate but sure of which party he favored, if not how to spell it, another voter wrote in "Republicate" on his ballot. Others filled in the oval next to the candidate's name and then, in the write-in area, wrote their names out as well.
The races where there is more than one choice marked or where the intent can't be determined are voided and the ballot is copied over with the corrections onto a new sheet to be run through the scanner again. The precinct count must be held up until that process is complete, which pushed the final results to 12:30 a.m. Wednesday.
"I'm not going to sacrifice accuracy for speed," Mrs. Bailey said. But with about 12,000 of those absentee votes that were cast during advance voting held up by the paper ballot count, the board of elections is considering creating two absentee precincts so the electronic votes can be reported earlier, she said. Still, at the end of the night, the record numbers all got sorted out correctly.
"The turnout was phenomenal," Mrs. Bailey said. "When you see the fruits of your labors pay off like that, it makes a difference."
Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.
A record number of votes in Augusta was handled without a hitch but election officials are pondering ways of reporting some results faster.
