Richland County is rather legendary for our election mishaps. The 2012 election will go down in history as one of the most bungled in American history as reported by The Free Times in their story "The Great Debacle Of 2012". The overall voting problems in Richland were recently recapped in a WIS TV story entitled "A Decade Of Woes".
This year is off to a bad start as thousands of voters have not received the mail in ballots they requested. The State reported Tuesday that Richland had hired a vendor to mail out their ballots for them which were supposed to be out by Oct 5th. However the director of voter registration said the vendor stopped after discovering an error in the data file the county provided them.
Today we have news of 3 SC districts suffering rather significant ballot challenges. In the low country incorrect ballots were mailed to 1,324 voters. District 7 voters received printed ballots for District 6 and District 6 voters didn't have the option to vote at all for their local politicians. Only 1 voter noticed this mistake and contacted the election commission otherwise it would have never been discovered. And it just wasn't mail in ballots. 225 in person voters were given the wrong ballots for early voting and since they have cast them they can't be corrected because SC law prohibits altering a ballot once it's been cast. So these people have lost their chance to vote in the local races.
County Board of Elections and Voter Registration Director Joe Debney said a printing error happened on an undetermined number of ballots covering County Council District 4. So they'll be trying to figure out what that means today.