Sen. Gerald Malloy, D-Hartsville, talks during a South Carolina Senate Judiciary Committee meeting in Columbia, S.C. on Tuesday, March 15, 2022. (Travis Bell/STATEHOUSE CAROLINA/Special to the SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — State Sen. Gerald Malloy is scheduled to appear Dec. 3 before the South Carolina Election Commission to challenge the results of his slim loss to Republican JD Chaplin following inconsistencies in the vote count.
The Hartsville Democrat, a 22-year veteran of the Senate, filed the protest this week after a mandatory recount revealed what state election officials referred to as concerning discrepancies between election night and recount ballot numbers .
Chaplin led Malloy by 278 votes ahead of the Nov. 14 recount — a margin already narrow enough to trigger an automatic recount. Due to the technology of modern elections, recounts don’t generally alter the numbers by much, if at all. But there was a relatively substantial difference this time in the recount of roughly 50,000 votes in a district that spans five counties.