On the way to the 2020 general election, nine SC counties had a process in place to verify the voter’s signature on absentee ballots – each slightly different; the other counties did not have a standard process or did nothing to verify signatures. Likewise, election officials in some counties contacted voters to give them an opportunity to resolve problems that would have caused their absentee ballots to be rejected; others do not. And those were just the irregularities that were highlighted in the lawsuits.
The problem was not that one way was right and the other was wrong; was that there was no uniformity – which means that the votes that would be counted in one county were being eliminated in another.
The biggest problem: this was not exclusive to the 2020 election. It is embedded in our system, the inevitable result of a state law that allows 46 autonomous electoral commissions to decide for themselves how to implement laws that explain what, without always explaining how. Although the State Electoral Commission is empowered to ensure local compliance with its policies, this only works when policies are in place and the application process is not simple.
H.3444 aims to change that by empowering the State Election Commission to “oversee and standardize the performance, conduct and practices” of county election commissions, to ensure that votes are counted in the same way in Greenville County as County Counties are counted. Charleston and the same way in Charleston County as in Aiken County.
It is a long-awaited change.
It may make sense to allow all county electoral commissions to interpret and apply state electoral laws as you see fit, if only county council, sheriff, school council and other single county elections are affected. But people in all counties voted for president, governor and US Senate. People in various counties vote in each race for the United States House and Solicitor and most legislative seats. Having different interpretations of what state law requires and allows – not to mention very different degrees of competence between committees – makes absolutely no sense.
Obviously, if it doesn’t make sense to let each county decide how votes are cast and counted, it also makes no sense to let legislators in each county handpick their election commissioners. Or to make district councils pay for the positions of electoral commissions over which they have no control. What would make sense would be to get rid of the politically appointed county election commissions completely and allow the State Election Commission to hire state officials – paid by the state – to compose the county’s election offices.
If lawmakers are not willing to go that far now, they need to make this the next step to professionalize and standardize our elections – and ensure that the next step comes soon.
What they do not need to do is to inject themselves into the functioning of the State Electoral Commission, as does the project of the Mayor, Jay Lucas. Under current law, the governor appoints the five members of the commission, but H.3444 would add four more commissioners, appointed by legislative leaders. This should not be a good start.
The problem with this proposal is not – as Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee complained bizarrely on Tuesday – that the bill allows the governor to appoint up to four commissioners from his party; he can do this under current law. The legislation passed by the committee actually increases the representation of minority parties on the commission, requiring that Legislative nominations be split 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats – changing the current Republican advantage from 4-1 to 6-3.
The problem is that allowing lawmakers to appoint electoral commissioners violates a central principle of our system of representative democracy: dividing power between three branches of government, so that they can control and balance each other. The Legislative’s job is to write the laws. The job of the executive branch of government – headed by the governor – is to enforce these laws.
If the Legislature does not like the way the laws are being implemented, it has the power and the duty to change them. There is no reason to change individuals who comply with these laws.