Democrats seek election investigation

RIDGELAND: Both state and local party have questions about June 8 voting.

By Mark Kreuzwieser
Carolina Morning News

The Jasper County Democratic Executive Committee will ask the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division to "investigate the entire June 8 election," the committee's chairman said Wednesday.

Also, the state Democratic Executive Committee on Wednesday officially asked SLED to investigate the June 8 Jasper County Council primary, specifically the race in which incumbent Barbara Clark was defeated by challenger LeRoy Blackshear.

Jasper Democratic Party Chairman Arthur Murphy said the local committee voted Tuesday night to ask SLED to investigate several complaints about the June 8 primary, including discrepancies with absentee ballots and the correlation between voter rolls and the actual number of voters who cast ballots at some precincts.

He expects the request to be sent to SLED today or Friday.

"We just want to satisfy everyone's concerns and questions," Murphy said.

The Jasper Democratic Party leadership had earlier rejected complaints from candidates about the June 8 primary.

Defeated County Council incumbents Barbara Clark and Paul Max Malphrus and challenger Samuel Gregory all were rebuffed in their earlier grievances.

Clark and defeated State House District 122 candidate Curtis Brantley took their appeal to the state Democratic Executive Committee in Columbia on June 19. The committee turned down their appeals, but agreed to ask SLED to investigate.

Candidates had complained that one voting precinct showed a total of 521 votes cast in one contest, yet the precinct's voter roll indicated only 298 voters had signed in.

Some 1,500 votes in the June 8 primary were later discounted as phantom votes, not actually cast by voters.

"We want to see if anything was done wrong because we're still just not sure how votes were counted or not counted," Murphy said. "We want to know if these problems were (voting) machine errors or human errors."

And the county Board of Elections threw out 280 absentee votes on June 8 because they didn't have the proper paperwork.

Also, disgruntled candidates and voters pointed out the coincidence of three candidates in one precinct receiving exactly 111 votes each.

SLED is also investigating election problems in Florence County at the behest of the state Democrats.