You can almost understand why most House Democrats were so suspicious of a long-overdue bill to give some consistency to the way counties conduct SC elections, after Governor Henry McMaster intruded into the debate with a conversation ridiculous of fraud.
“Fraud,” after all, is the word that Republicans across the country are using to justify efforts to reverse who can easily vote in elections; In traditionally red Georgia, for example, the state Senate voted last week to repeal a 2005 law that allowed everyone to vote absent, after complaints from the Republican Party that many people voted absent last year.
While we must be absolutely aware of laws that lack sufficient safeguards to prevent real electoral fraud, the fact is that investigation after investigation has found that the amount of electoral fraud in this country is infinitesimal.
What has come to be called fraud generally amounts to different interpretations of state laws – or, in some cases, like the one that SC Attorney General Alan Wilson tried to meddle in last year, state voting laws that people in others states just don’t like it. Despite McMaster’s warning in a letter to lawmakers last week that they needed to “safeguard the voting process against the threat of fraud”, this difference in interpretation is the only problem we’ve seen in South Carolina.
When politicians try to change the way the state enforces its electoral laws, as they did last year here and across the country, it is up to the courts to classify competing interpretations. But there are serious constitutional problems when state law allows county electoral commissions to apply their own individual interpretations to state law, with, say, a county using a process to verify the validity of voter signatures, an adjacent county using a different method and another county accepts all signatures without any verification.
H.3444 aims to correct this problem by doing something that most people probably assumed was already happening: requiring all county electoral commissions to follow not only the same laws, but also the same interpretations when those laws are unclear. Specifically, they would have to follow the interpretation of the State Election Commission – which, again, is what most people assumed was already happening. Because it’s the only thing that makes sense.
Just as the SC and US elections are not fraught with fraud, H.3444 is not, as some Democrats have accused, laying the groundwork for suppression of voters. (If lawmakers wanted to suppress the vote, they would not tamper with an unstable change like this; they would approve some of the bills that extremist Republicans introduced to … suppress the vote.) The fact that anyone could object the requirement for consistent statewide interpretation of our electoral laws speaks to the opposition’s paranoia – which shows how poisonous our entire electoral culture has become.
In fact, the only legitimate objection to the bill by Mayor Jay Lucas was his attempt to expand the size of the State Election Commission with additional members appointed by lawmakers – who have no responsibility to appoint members to any Power commissions. Executive.
So it was a big victory for the good government on Wednesday, when the House removed the change in the composition of the Electoral Commission and passed the bill with the simple change of requiring the county’s electoral commissions to follow any policies or interpretations of the law defined by the governors appointed state commission.
Unspoken – but certainly in the minds of residents in counties like Richland, which endured nearly a decade of failed elections due to sheer incompetence – was the fact that the bill also makes it easier for the state to intervene to protect itself against incompetent election commissions from county. Although the state law was amended in 2014 to reduce the problem, it still only allows the state to recommend training and request the dismissal of employees.
Meanwhile, a Senate subcommittee is meeting on Tuesday to debate its own version of a “South Carolina Electoral Commission Restructuring Act” that does nothing to resolve inconsistent county-to-county policies, but injects the Senate in the operations of the State Electoral Commission, by requiring confirmation from the Senate of the nominations of the governor’s commission, as well as the agency director.
There is nothing wrong with requiring Senate approval for commissioners – this is already required for many nominations for governor, not only here, but also in states that respect the separation of powers. But the executive director of an agency that is deliberately isolated from direct political interference is another thing: even the governor does not have an official word about who the election commissioner is; neither should the Senate.
The other part of S.499 gives the House and Senate the automatic right to waste tax dollars to hire their own lawyers to defend state electoral laws in courts. Often, the two agencies already do this, but they need to ask the court for permission, since the state constitution assigns this role to the state attorney general. There is no good reason to change that. Or to interpose the Senate in the operations of the State Electoral Commission.
What is a good reason to do – what the Senate should do instead of pursuing this stupid bill – is to pass H.3444 to clarify the real problem with state electoral laws that was revealed through the avalanche of lawsuits that accompanied the 2020 election.