Greenville County primary: What caused long waits at the polls?

Daniel J. Gross | The Greenville News

About 15 faulty voting machines at Greenville County polling locations were to blame for long lines and delayed late-night results during Tuesday's primary election.

Poll workers in some Greenville County precincts noticed that some voting machines had malfunctioned and shut down completely, preventing voters from using those machines at three polling locations.

Only two of the eight machines were working at the Taylors Elementary School voting precinct, causing a long delay to vote for some.

Conway Belangia, Greenville County's director of voter registration and elections, said some voters had to wait about an hour and 20 minutes to get through the lines.

"When a machine reads a problem, to protect votes, it shuts down," he said. "In those three precincts, it really slowed things down."

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In the event of a complete shut down, technicians with Election Systems & Software, the manufacturer of the machines, have to be called in to open up the devices and extract voting information.

The machines are proprietary so only technicians are allowed inside them because they are trained to handle malfunctions.

A cause for the malfunctions is still unknown, and the machines have since been pulled out of the county's inventory of machines. They won't be used until they are fixed.

"We won't know until we have the chance to see well after the election," Belangia said. "ES&S will hep us do an analysis of the machines and help us determine what the problem was."

Some voters were skeptical of final tallies and disputed whether all votes had been counted after the election's office closed.

Belangia said staffers ensured that all votes had been counted. The final tallies came in around 1 a.m.

"We made sure we did our due diligence. We were very deliberate in what we did, and we are confident we got all of the numbers," Belangia said. "All votes cast have been tabulated and printed."

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The county used about 650 voting machines Tuesday out of its inventory of about 1,200 machines. The remaining machines not used on Tuesday will be used in the runoff election held in two weeks.

The numbers that came in Tuesday night are unofficial results. Votes from all races will be certified by noon Thursday, Belangia said.

He was pleased with the diligence of the county's poll workers and said voters were patient despite some long wait times.

"Voters were understanding for the most part and workers did what they needed to do to calm fears and get with us so we could get machines ready," Belangia said.