Carrying a cane, Blake Smith made his way to the Ward 7 polling site at Sheridan Elementary School in Orangeburg to cast his ballot in the Republican Party runoff Tuesday.

“It’s our duty, and it’s one of our sacred freedoms,” he said about voting. “If we don’t, we ain’t got no business complaining.”

Smith said he did his homework and decided well in advance who would get his vote. “I don’t think it’s too hard” to select a candidate and then come out and vote, he said.

Of the 50,264 Orangeburg County voters eligible to participate in Tuesday’s Republican primary runoffs, only 2,113 cast ballots – or 4.2 percent. In the initial primary, 5.3 percent of registered voters participated in the Republican primary, while 13.9 percent participated in the Democratic primary.

The light turnout was to be expected, as runoffs typically have lower turnout than primaries, said Earl Whalen, Orangeburg County’s director of voter registration and elections.

“It was a good day for a training session for our poll workers on the new equipment. They did an exceptional job, as they always do,” he said. “They’re the front-line of democracy, in my opinion. Without these folks, we would not be able to experience these freedoms, the voting process that we all take for granted.”

By mid-afternoon, 73 voters in Ward 7 had cast their ballots on the new electronic voting machines that are being used statewide.

“Everybody loves them. They can’t believe how easy they are to operate,” Wanda Blewer said. As a poll manager, she likes them, too.

“They have safeguards against a lot of the problems we had in the past,” Blewer said. “They won’t let people vote for too many candidates.”

The new machines, and their operators, are not infallible. By 1 p.m., poll workers at Branchville 2 had made three calls for assistance with their machines, poll manager Betty Wilson said.

When the machines were initially activated, they indicated that votes already had been cast. A county elections official gave them a code to override the message, she said.

Later, as a poll worker prepared the machine for a voter, the whole screen went black, and a maintenance worker had to be dispatched from Orangeburg.

Despite all that, Wilson prefers the new machines. They “are so much easier – far easier” than the previous equipment, and prevent overvoting and illegible ballots, she explained.

The biggest problem of the day for precinct workers – at several precincts, not just Branchville 2 – was boredom.

No one turned out to vote in the Republican primary in Ward 4 in Orangeburg County. Suburban 7 drew the most voters, with 132, followed by Santee 1’s 110 voters.

At various precincts, elections officials whiled away the time reading newspapers and Sunday school lessons, doing word search puzzles and engaging in conversation.

Their discussions covered just about everything from speed limits to marriages, from the governor’s job performance – he was not on the ballot – to the weather and the county fair.

There was no outward sign of a polling place at Robert E. Howard Middle School in Orangeburg, but inside the gym three poll workers sat behind a long table waiting for voters in the Suburban 1 precinct.

As of mid-afternoon, there was only one signature on the sign-in sheet; only one sticker missing from a sheet of “I voted” tags in this overwhelmingly Democratic precinct. A total of three voters showed up by the end of the day.

On the table, near a box of take-out fried chicken, was a thoroughly thumbed-through copy of Tuesday’s T&D with its prominent front-page headline, “Runoff turnout may be low.”

Turnout for the Republican primary two weeks earlier wasn’t much higher. “We had three,” poll worker Ethel B. Moseley said.

Yet she good-naturedly works the polls, time after time.

“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” she said.

Blewer, the Ward 7 poll worker, said there are advantages to working the polls. “You get to see people you don’t ordinarily see except at the polls,” she said.

Although it’s rough getting up at 4:30 a.m., arriving at the poll site at 6 a.m. to get set up for the 7 a.m. opening, then working nonstop into the evening, Blewer said she’s glad that the days of hand-counting paper ballots – sometimes way past midnight – is over.

Compared to Suburban 1, the polling site in Rowesville was positively bustling, with 17 voters casting votes as of mid-afternoon.

“I thought we’d have more, with (Mike) Campbell and (Andre) Bauer” locked in a dead heat for the lieutenant governor nomination, said poll worker Mary Nell Fairey.

But the turnout beats the previous runoff, where just nine voters cast ballots, said poll worker Patsy Bush. Wilson and the other poll workers at Branchville 2 said they had a most unusual visitor during the primary two weeks ago. The polling place is in the community center in the heart of town.

So they were astounded to see a fawn walk up the sidewalk and poke its head into the door, as if to ask what was going on.

A startled poll worker jumped and screamed at the deer, which took off down the town’s main drag with some youths joining in the chase.

-- T&D correspondents Donna L. Holman and Lisa B. Stokes contributed to this report. T&D Staff Writer Lee Hendren can be reached by e-mail at lhendren@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5552. Discuss this and other stories online at TheTandD.com.

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