The one place in the vicinity of the Pike County Courthouse without power in Magnolia on Tuesday night — Election Day, no less — just happened to be the county’s election headquarters.
Not long after officials gathered to begin ballot counting after polls closed at 7 p.m., the building experienced electrical problems. Officials and others at the scene reported flickering lights, smoke coming from the walls and the smell of burnt wiring.
“The lights started flickering, we started hearing the snapping and crackling; that putrid smell or acrid smell when there’s an electrical fire just permeated the building. We knew we had a problem,” said Election Commission chair Trudy Berger.
Officials called the Magnolia Volunteer Fire Department and an electrician, who reportedly could not determine the origin of the problem at the onset.
Election commissioners later blamed the outage on a tree limb they speculated had fallen earlier in the day and shorted out a fuse to the power line.
Inside the building, which sits across the street from the Pike County Court Annex and also is home to the public defenders’ office, no less than half a dozen flashlights illuminated the harried process of trying to electrify the building.
Meanwhile, election officials ran extension cords to neighboring county buildings. “We had about 300 feet of extension cord,” Berger said.
“This thing was so jerry-rigged it was unreal,” Berger said.
As power failed, Berger said she worried a surge could damage the computer server containing election data.
“You’re looking at an $8,000 piece of equipment sitting on the floor in Election Central,” she said.
Berger said someone initially suggested moving the equipment to another building, but she deep-sixed that idea, fearing that would hurt the integrity of the vote count.
Until commissioners managed to get some form of electricity, Berger ordered the ballot boxes to remain sealed.
“There was never a security issue with any of the boxes. They were all kept sealed,” she said.
While the extension cords run to neighboring buildings were good enough to power some equipment, they were hardly adequate to power up an elections file server, so Pike County Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Johnny Scott retrieved a generator that could.
Berger said power was restored to the building as officials were counting votes from the 23rd of Pike County’s 25 precincts. Officials continued the ballot tabulation on generator power nonetheless, not wanting to disrupt the process in midstream.
She said that while the outage was probably one of the worst things that could happen on an election night, she’s proud of the way officials rose to the challenge and got the job done in the face of adversity.
“I can’t say enough about the crew we have working together to do elections in Pike County,” she said.
“You don’t want to have to go through an emergency like that, but I was glad to know that we were able to work together and pull our ox out of the ditch.”
