The Orangeburg County Election Commission certified the results of the general election Friday morning at the county Administration Building on Amelia Street.

Commissioners also unanimously accepted the challenge, provisional and fail-safe ballots and named the winners in the Soil & Water Conservation and Watershed races, which were completely decided by write-in votes.

Orangeburg Voter Registration Office director Howard Jackson said that approximately 75 additional ballots were counted and certified. He said that none of the additional votes affected the outcome of any race.

Matthew Summers won the lone open Orangeburg County Soil & Water Conservation seat with 133 votes. In the Watershed District Commission race, Lawton Brown had 11 votes and Walter Fuller and Buddy Felder both garnered three votes to fill the three commissioner spots.

During the meeting, Cam Underwood of Orangeburg, who worked at the Suburban 7 precinct, asked election commissioners why some individuals received several absentee ballots in the mail.

“Some people were receiving 2-3 absentee ballots and didn’t know what to do with them, so they returned one and kept the others,” Underwood said. “I heard about 10 different people tell me that.”

“We did have a label making machine that malfunctioned and caused several absentee ballot labels to be made,” Jackson said. “But in our process we stamp the date and time of when the first ballot arrives and enter that into the system. It is the only ballot that is counted.”

Jackson did acknowledge that a problem created across the state by the record number of requests for absentee ballots resulted in poll clerks not having up-to-date absentee ballot lists at the county precincts.

“There is always that possibility that some people could have voted twice, but there are no indicators it happened here,” said Jackson, who added his office will go over documentation from the election to iron out any problems in the future.

“We actually have incident report forms that we have each staff member and commissioner fill out,” Jackson said. “Then we go over those reports and see what we can improve upon. We got started as early as we could, but the volume and numbers in this election were just huge and no one could have anticipated this. We already have some measures in place to correct some of these issues and those actions will be made public at one of the Election Commission meetings in the near future.”

Election Commission Chairman Rut Thomas said he felt that voting in Orangeburg County went well considering the large number of absentee ballot voters and individual precinct turnout.

“I think our people did well and they kept up with it,” Thomas said. “If anyone was qualified, we let them vote. That’s all we can do and that’s what we’re here for.”

One unqualified candidate who received a number of write-in votes in several political races in Orangeburg County clearly would not meet residency requirements to hold local office.

“Mickey (Mouse) always gets a lot of votes for different offices,” said Jackson, laughing. “In one local race he got 15 votes.”

T&D Staff Writer Phil Sarta can be reached at psarata@timesanddemocrat.com and 803-533-5540.

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