Time is (Big) Money: Richland, SC Problems Cost County $153,000

[Image courtesy of the2womancrusade]

Late last month, I blogged about how a local Tennessee election official decided to “lawyer up” in response to a state investigation and questions about his performance.

This week, we got an indication of how much that can cost a community when Richland County, South Carolina – site of some of the nation’s longest lines in 2012 – released details on the legal fees associated with the investigation and then demotion of its chief election official. The (Columbia) State has more:

Richland County taxpayers are footing the bill for nearly $153,000 in legal fees to investigate what went so wrong in the Nov. 6 election and to fend off protests that threatened to unravel the results.

The expenses, detailed in a 46-page packet obtained by The State newspaper under South Carolina’s open-records law, include:

• $72,423.10 for lawyer Steve Hamm, hired at the request of the Richland County Board of Elections & Voter Registration, to uncover the web of mistakes that resulted in waits of up to seven hours for voters and a cache of misplaced ballots.

• $9,461.25 for a lawyer to represent the interests of elections director Lillian McBride, viewed as incompetent by her critics and as a scapegoat by her defenders. She since has been demoted to a deputy director.

The investigation found that while Director Lillian McBride had made numerous mistakes, there were also other problems that contributed to the poor performance on Election Day:

John Nichols, hired to look out for McBride’s interests, said he negotiated with the elections board for McBride’s new position as deputy director of voter registration. He also appeared with her at meetings on the election debacle.

Nichols described his job as “simply to, I think, make sure that the mood of the time did not railroad her.”

“There are a lot of things that went wrong Nov. 6, and she acknowledged some of those failings,” he said. But Hamm’s investigation revealed mistakes made by McBride’s staff and legislators, too, who weren’t paying attention to the overgrown precincts in some of their districts, Nichols said.

“There’s enough blame to go around.”

The most remarkable thing to me is that the bill could have been so much higher, given the amount of work Hamm in particular has already put in on the case:

In February, the county informed Hamm it would pay no more for his investigation into what went wrong Nov. 6.

“The faucet has been turned off on the investigation,” Richland County Council chairman Kelvin Washington said last week.

“We felt the only thing we should be paying is for the legal help,” he added. “He’s done work pro bono to make sure he gets to the bottom of it, but we paid him as much as we’re going to pay him for the investigation aspect.”

Hamm went to work Nov. 12. In the days following the election, he helped establish a final count of ballots, complicated by the discovery of two sealed bags in a closet containing some 150 ballots and absentee ballots that were not being read properly by a ballot-counting machine.

“I spent a great deal of time simply trying to get the election completed,” Hamm said.

Hamm’s investigation detailed the condition of the county’s voting machines and how many were delivered to the county’s 124 precincts, reviewed how many voters came out and how long it took them to vote. He hired Duncan Buell, a University of South Carolina expert on computerized voting machines, paying him out of his own pocket, he said.

Invoices show Hamm and an assistant worked 10- to 13-hour days in November and frequently didn’t charge the county for all the hours they worked. While the records were heavily redacted to omit subject matter, they reflected hours of interviews with election staff, including McBride; deputy director Garry Baum; Cheryl Goodwin, who was in charge of voting machine maintenance; and others.

It isn’t yet clear what will be the impact of the final report – which will be delivered both to the county as well as members of the county’s legislative delegation – but it is apparent that Richland County will have gotten its money’s worth out of its legal fees – in large part to Mr. Hamm.

I guess lawyers can be election geeks, too!