ST. GEORGE — As results streamed in on election night, a couple faulty USB drives led to an extended hand-count and re-scanning of thousands of early voting ballots in Dorchester County.

Kizzie Scott, the director of the county’s Board of Voter Registration and Elections, told The Post and Courier on election night that the data for more than 5,000 ballots from two early voting locations — Miles Road Baptist Church and Wescott Park — were unable to be uploaded from two USB drives.

She explained the afternoon of Nov. 4 that those flash drives came from the machines that voters feed their completed ballots into, which scans the forms and puts the voting data onto the USBs. Since the data was unable to be uploaded, she and her staff had to re-scan all of the ballots associated with the flash drives to create a new USB with the data and also hand-count them to double check that none were missed or erroneously included.

Scott added that because the drives were from early voting locations, the votes tied to them had been spread across multiple days, meaning they had to make sure they pulled ballots from the correct dates.

“In this case, we had to re-scan all those ballots because that was the only way that we could produce the results for those locations,” she said.

Scott noted that this is not a new phenomenon, saying that she and her staff have previously had to do this “for numerous elections.” She reiterated that the hand-count was just a “checks-and-balance” measure and that “there was nothing wrong with the ballots.”

The hand-count and re-scanning of the ballots came against the backdrop of a razor-thin U.S. House race in the Lowcountry, where Democrat Nancy Lacore edged out Republican Jenny Costa Honeycutt in District 1, which includes a small part of Dorchester County.

Honeycutt had told supporters around 11 p.m. on election night that “there was a mistake or miscalculation” with the ballots in Dorchester County that made the results of the race inconclusive until the process was completed.

Scott said Nov. 4 that Honeycutt could have come to the board’s Summerville office to see the process play out and ask questions.

“It was an open process,” Scott said. “She could have came here. She could have pulled me aside. She could have asked me to explain the process to her versus just going out there, just thinking something is totally wrong because we are here late trying to ensure that the numbers that we are putting out there are accurate.”

Scott and her team also completed the state-mandated hand count audit on Nov. 4. She added that the certification of the election results will take place on Nov. 6 at the Dorchester County Council Chambers in St. George.