COLUMBIA, S.C. — In a five-page 'memorandum' sent to the Richland County Board of Voter Registration and Elections, former executive director Rokey Suleman laid out what went wrong in November.
Suleman resigned a few days before the email was sent to the Board. The email is dated Valentine's Day, February 14, 2019.
The first two pages of Suleman's letter detail the issues the County had with voting machines.
The letter says the elections office could not get some of the PEBs to work properly, so the manufacturer sent new ones on October 12th.
Suleman claims the issue put them a week behind schedule.
In the second half of the letter, Suleman explains what he claims went wrong in November of 2018 leading to 1,040 not-counted votes.
The resigned director says they were first informed of count discrepancies in mid-January.
"We identified several minor anomalies with the by-mail absentee voting numbers, primarily centered on differences in the number of reported attention envelopes," Suleman wrote.
He continued that the discovery led them to 10 machines that had been quarantined in absentee voting, due to other mechanical issues with the PEBs.
Suleman claims a technician sent by the manufacturing company was supposed to pull the data from all 10 machines on election night. But, the data was pulled and then transferred incorrectly, according to the letter.
"These results were uploaded into UNITY on election night, with our office making the assumption that the results on the flash card were complete and accurate," Suleman wrote.
However, he continues that their internal review found that two of the machines were allegedly never inspected by the technician.
"Although we have not been able to fully reconstruct what happened with the machine consolidation - no one staff person was in the office the entire time with the ES&S technician - it would seem to be the case that eight machines were consolidated onto the flash cards but two of the machines in the UNITY room were never touched by the technician," the email reads.
Suleman wrote that the office would implement three procedural changes to how absentee voting is tracked, however it is unclear if those procedures will be implemented now that he resigned.
The former director blamed improper procedure at two precincts for the other tabulation issues on election night.
"In two voting precincts - Rice Creek 1 and Ward 32 - the election clerks failed to close all the voting machines," he wrote.
The letter continues that a dead battery and data upload errors led to the missing votes from those two precincts.
Richland County and the State Election Commission have repeatedly told WLTX the missing votes, now tabulated, did not change any race outcomes.
Suleman resigned earlier this month and the entire election board was removed last week due to Governor Henry McMaster's executive order.