COLOMBIA, SC (AP) – Nearly 20,000 votes were cast in the November general election in South Carolina, when the first voters on Monday had to make their choice in person.
Several counties have opened polling places where people can vote almost as if they were in person on election day, instead of having to send their absentee ballot.
Lines formed in Greenville, Columbia, Charleston, Spartanburg, Rock Hill and elsewhere on Monday. Some people waited up to two hours, but waits of about an hour were more common.
Most of South Carolina’s largest counties plan to open additional vacancies to vote for an absent person later this week or next week. Offices are usually open from 8 am to 5 pm on weekdays and some will be open on Saturday mornings in the last few weeks before election day.
Pastor Adeira Black waited about two hours to vote on Monday in Richland County. He spends a lot of time out of town and wanted to make sure he would vote.
Black voted on election day in the June state primaries. First he found his polling place in Columbia closed. He then waited three and a half hours to vote in an election in which experts believe the turnout was only a third of the more than 2 million people who were expected to vote in the general election.
“I didn’t want to run into this again,” said Black.
More than 18,000 votes have already been cast in the South Carolina election, according to the state’s Electoral Commission. About 3,500 of them are military personnel and their families are stationed abroad.
Many counties expected to have at least 1,000 absent votes cast on Monday alone. The state expects a million or more ballots missing from this election with concerns from COVID-19. This would break the record of around 360,000 absent votes across the state in 2016.
As of Monday morning, the commission had already issued more than 215,000 absentee ballots.
Absent voting is open to everyone after South Carolina lawmakers, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, withdrew the requirement that voters have an excuse to vote absent, such as being over 65 or out of town on election day.
Election workers are also preparing for a series of absentee ballots in the mail. A federal judge ruled that absentee ballots sent by mail do not need a witness’s signature, but that decision is being appealed to the US Supreme Court.
The president, a seat in the U.S. Senate, and disputes in all seven US House districts in South Carolina are all on the ballot.
President Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in the conservative state by about 14 percentage points in 2016, but U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham faces an increasingly competitive race against Jaime Harrison.
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Associated Press editor Meg Kinnard contributed to this report.
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Follow Jeffrey Collins on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JSCollinsAP.
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The AP early voting guide gives you the facts about how to vote early, by mail or absent from each state: https://interactives.ap.org/advance-voting-2020/