Officials to look at voting issues: Long lines at some precincts a concern (SC)
GoUpstate.com. November 10, 2008. By Jason Spencer

Julie Frates' story about her Election Day experience isn't uncommon, particularly among voters in the northern part of Spartanburg County: She waited in line for hours, watching other voters grow frustrated and leave before casting a ballot.

Frates said she waited almost five hours to vote at Mountain View Baptist Church, occasionally taking video of empty voting machines from her place in line. Her mother, who is 52, has a last name that begins with R, and so when Frates realized that some lines were moving faster than others, she called her mom - who had left - to tell her to come back to the polls.

She also said that when she complained to election officials the next day, her concerns were written off as something that had been sensationalized by the media.

"I was just given excuse after excuse. And then they gave me a paper to sign up to volunteer," Frates said. "I don't have a problem with volunteering, but maybe they need to promote it a little bit. How can you get volunteers if you don't tell people about it?"

Spartanburg County Office of Registrations and Elections Director Henry Laye will address many of those concerns, and more, when he debriefs the county's Election Commission and Voter Registration Board at 5 p.m. Wednesday at a public meeting.

Laye already has said that the county needed about 1,000 volunteers for Election Day, and ended up with less than half that number.

So, aside from addressing the need to recruit more poll managers, he'll be talking about the need for early voting (versus the current system of absentee voting), splitting precincts so that some are not considerably larger than others in terms of population, eliminating the need to alphabetize lines, and handling handicapped voters better.

It's a tall order, and one that won't be complete any time soon. But there's two years before the next major election.

"Are we going to get better? Damn straight," Laye said. "Overall, I applaud the voting public for being patient, for standing in long lines."

Some of the most obvious solutions could be the most tedious to implement. For instance, the median number of voters in Spartanburg County's 92 precincts is 1,663. But 20 of those precincts have more than 2,500 registered voters, including the polls at Boiling Springs High School, which has a whopping 6,549 registered voters. That compares to smaller precincts like Una and Silverhill Methodist, which have 459 and 632 registered voters, respectively.

But splitting precincts or tweaking precinct lines can be a long process that involves the state Legislature and the Justice Department.

Laye's office looks like a war room, with a large dry-erase board on one side that's full of strategies for making the next major Election Day run smoother - strategies like drives to add more volunteers (who receive $120 for a day's work), modernizing voting machines (the phrase "paper trail" has a question mark after it), finding new places to be used as polling places in case large precincts are split, and installing wireless networks on the laptops some poll managers use so that voters don't have to wait in line based on the first letter of their last name.

Laye said he lost 15 pounds over the past few weeks, as the election office has been constantly busy. He said his employees have logged 325 hours of overtime. He had 73 voice mails waiting for him when he got to work Thursday alone.

Still, he's maintained an optimistic attitude, even if that was tested at times: "It was everyone's eagerness to vote that thrilled me."

Anyone who wants to speak at Wednesday's meeting should contact Laye's office at 596-2549 by lunchtime Wednesday in order to be placed on the agenda, said Don Watson, chairman of the Voter Registration Board.

The meeting is open to the public. Anyone who wishes to attend should plan on arriving a few minutes early, as security locks most of the doors at the elections office at 5 p.m., Watson said.

Read Spencer's blog at www.goupstate.com/crazyworld.