Lawrence Moore: Federal Action Needed to Stop Erosion of Voting Rights in South Carolina
By Lawrence Moore
Voters nationwide, especially in South Carolina, are encountering increasing barriers to their right to vote. In 2023, the South Carolina General Assembly secured 14 days of early voting. But we also lost voter drop boxes and now face additional restraints on mail-in ballots. New laws in 2022 reduced turnout from 2020 for those 64 and older. Officials are eroding our democracy by requiring stricter ID requirements to access the polls, purging our voter rolls, and gerrymandering districts.
Federal legislators must not neglect the plight of people of color, poor people, and people with disabilities who face the brunt of these assaults on their right to vote. Fortunately, there are two bills in Congress – the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act – that would codify federal voting rights protections that would protect South Carolinians and all Americans.
However, while many legislators around the country are acting in good faith to protect voting rights, many other states have introduced measures that effectively result in voter suppression. Increasingly restrictive voter ID laws are pushing voters of color and low income to the margins, demonstrating a clear affirmation by many lawmakers that representation is a right reserved for only certain citizens.
Our state pioneered some of these antidemocratic norms. Our 2012 voter ID law failed to comply with the 1965 Voting Rights Act when it was submitted for federal review. Rather than comply, South Carolina sued the Department of Justice. A Federal Court found that requiring specific types of voter ID would place an undue burden on South Carolinians, so that requirement was stricken. Less than a year later, however, the Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted the Justice Department’s ability to hold states accountable. This allowed South Carolina to approve these same restrictions and create the current law, resulting in the suppression of voters of color.
South Carolina currently requires specific types of ID, all of which require types of documentation that are statistically more difficult for BIPOC and low-income voters to obtain. The most extreme is the instance of the driver’s license test, which requires those testing to get the day off of work and to have the cost of the fees as well as access to a registered, insured vehicle. State IDs and voter registration photos are no solution since these are systematically denied to those who have misplaced their birth certificates until the document can be reissued, and that’s a catch-22 situation. Similarly, South Carolina requires a stable address, unjustly depriving young or destitute South Carolinians of their right to vote. This issue also affects voters with disabilities for whom voting is already more difficult.
Purging duly registered voters from registries disproportionately disenfranchises BIPOC and low-income voters. In our state, voters receive insufficient notification that they have been removed from voter rolls. This, together with the requirement that voters register well in advance of the next election, has resulted in 167 thousand voters in South Carolina being purged from the voter rolls. That’s more than 5% of registered South Carolina voters.
Gerrymandering is another grave concern. South Carolina’s Congressional District 1 was found by a district court to be unconstitutional – pending Supreme Court review – because it intentionally diluted the Black vote. The traditionally partisan district began electing officials from both parties, so South Carolina redrew the district to move 62% of the district’s Black residents out to keep the results favorable to the party in power and silence the Black vote. However, this only represents the worst case. The reality is that this behavior is par for the course of corrupt politicians. Our 2nd, 5th, and 6th districts continue to be gerrymandered, diluting the voices of black and brown communities, and creating election results that do not accurately represent the will of the people of South Carolina.
This is why it is imperative for the survival of our democracy to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. These bills would restore the federal government’s power to oversee and challenge these actions aimed at depriving voters of their rights. Our democratic erosion is fixable. America recognized this issue and its gravity in South Carolina and other states in the 1960s and passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It is now time for those lawmakers who support democracy to act once more on behalf of those they represent.
Lawrence Moore is the Executive Director and Board Chair at Carolina for All, an organization dedicated to the advancement of voter rights and community involvement in politics.
