COLUMBIA, S.C. — Time is running out for South Carolina voters to register to vote in the presidential election. The deadline is the first week of October.
“There's approximately 3.3 million registered voters in the state, which is up about 100,000 from the start of the year,” John Michael Catalano said.
Catalano is with the South Carolina Election Commission and says beating 2020’s numbers at the polls, may be tough but not impossible.
“For any presidential election year, you can expect turnout to be over 65%. Now in 2020 we had the second highest turnout for a presidential election year in our state's history. If we top that, we'll be in a really good spot and that was around 72% turnout,”
So who is expected at the polls? We took a look at the numbers and since January more than 57,000 women in the state have registered to vote. In men there were more than 48,000 new registrations.
"The number one thing that drives turnout in the election is number one, it's the candidates on the ballot, and number two, it's the issues on the ballot. it's really not so much a love of democracy, although I'd like to think that it is a love of democracy that are bringing to the people to the polls. It's partly that, but it's more you really are passionate about a particular issue, or you're passionate about a particular candidate,” Catalano said.
And while more people register to vote as the election approaches, local voting offices prepare for the large crowds.
"We're doing the parts on our end to be auditing, daily, we audited after the election, we're doing the right type of testing before. We're also training our poll workers so they're also keen to know what to look for,” Travis Alexander said.
Alexander is the director of voter registration & elections for Richland County, he says per state law poll workers must complete trainings 30 days before the election.
"They can see the equipment. We can go through different scenarios. We can also go through a state mandated kind of lesson, a PowerPoint that's created to kind of give us some more details and things that they might see for this 2024 election, so they're better prepared,” he said.
Alexander says all types of ballots including paper and absentee ballots are tested before election day.
“We'll do a public testing that the candidates would be aware of, political parties be aware of that they could come by our office, we will actually test, I think we probably have 269 ballot different ballot styles. We'll actually go through and test every single ballot style, every single candidate's name, just to ensure that those voting machines will work properly on election day,” he said.
And the machines and the backup system make sure all votes get counted.
“Our system is not connected to the internet, so the integrity there, that vote is safe. Let's say for instance the machines do crash or do not work, that paper ballot is there, so that paper ballot can then be counted, and then by the state election commission, we have an audit that's done on five of our locations that we'll go through and do a hand count audit, just to ensure that if there were 1000 votes cast on this one machine that 1000 votes were cast properly,” Alexander said.
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