By Brett Bursey
Director, SC Progressive Network
The last couple of weeks of hearings in the House and Senate on voting reform legislation have gone a little better than expected. Not to say we are winning, but we have mixed results. We can anticipate that there will be an early voting bill passed out this session. The best version (the one we sponsored), H-3608 (Mack-D Charleston) was the only one of six early voting bills to come out of subcommittee. We had to give up the Same Day Registration aspect of the bill that allowed citizens to register to vote between 15 and three days before the election to get it out of subcommittee. Rep. Bakari Sellers (D-Orangeburg), who is on the House Judiciary Election Laws subcommittee, did a magnificent job moving the bill to the full committee.
Our sponsor of the Early Voting bill in the Senate, S-369 (Leventis, D-Sumter) testified at a Senate Judiciary subcommitee April 2 about the practicality and benefits of registering voters during the early voting period. We presented Michael Dickerson, the Ex. Director of the Mecklenburg Co. Board of Elections, to testify about how that county, with 600,000 voters, runs its early voting system. Dickerson told the subcommittee (Senators Campsen, Cleary, and Scott) that the county that includes Charlotte uses the exact same machines to vote as we do in SC. Dickerson said that the system has bipartisan support, the citizens and the election workers love it, and it saves money.
Sen. Campsen (R-Charleston) has a voting reform bill that calls for early voting as we experienced it in 2008, but without having to have an excuse. Campsen’s bill calls for early voting only at the county election office — no satellite facilities — and includes photo ID’, doing away with fusion voting, and increasing the penalties for fraud. It is the worst bill we can come out of this session with, but will still be better than what we have by allowing “no excuse early voting.” The election workers testified that Campsen’s bill would overwhelm the county offices and make the elderly and infirm wait in line with thousands of other voters.
Hearings in the Senate will continue, probably on April 16, and we will continue to argue for our early voting bill that calls for satellite facilities, and same-day registration. We are considering offering as a compromise applying photo ID requirements to those who register at the early voting centers. This would impact only a small percentage of voters (in Mecklenburg, only 2,000 out of 120,000 were Same Day Registrants), not impact the elderly, rural and minority voters who may not have photo IDs, and give the Republicans who demand photo IDs a face-saving victory. Accepting any form of photo ID is controversial among our allies, and we need to reach a consensus on this.
The bill to restrict petition candidates (S-590 & H-3208) will probably pass the House and is in the Senate subcommittee. The Senate sponsor of the bill, Brad Hutto (D-Orangeburg) assures us that he will narrow it to only apply to citizens not being able to sign a petition for a candidate for an office they voted for in a primary. The bill would currently prohibit a voter from signing a petition for a candidate for ANY office if they voted in a primary, even if there were no candidate for the office they wanted to sign a petition for.
The bill calls for petition candidates to have to file notice of their intention to run by March 30, prior to the general election. This deadline has been held unconstitutional by the courts, and Sen. Hutto is willing to consider moving the filing date for petition candidates back to the Aug 15 deadline for third-party candidates.