The Richland County Voter Registration office needs volunteers on Saturday, Oct. 18, to help enter registration information at its office at 2020 Hampton St. in downtown Columbia. The great work that everyone has done in Richland has left the election office swamped. We can’t start our Get Out The Vote drive until we have all the folks entered in the system.

Volunteers are needed from 9am until 5pm. Call the Missing Voter Project‘s John Dawkins at 803-467-1981 if you can help, even if it’s just for an hour or two.

At the urging of the SC Progressive Network, state legislators have requested that SC Attorney General Henry McMaster issue an opinion on the state statute regulating emergency ballots at polling places.

“After the failure of many of the voting computers in Horry County during the January Republican presidential primary, where many voters were turned away from the polls, we found that no law requires precincts to have emergency paper ballots,” said Network Director Brett Bursey. Horry County election official Lisa Bourcier reported that “80-90 percent” of the county’s more than 300 machines malfunctioned. Voters in many of the county’s 118 precincts were told to come back later, on a cold and rainy day, because emergency paper ballots ran out shortly after the polls opened and the machines failed to operate.

Rep. Tracy Edge, a McCain campaign official, reported that his mother-in-law was only the 12th person to vote in her precinct, and that she was given a blank piece of paper because they didn’t have emergency ballots. State Election Commission spokesperson Chris Whitmire was widely quoted as telling people to vote on “paper towels” if necessary.

Section (A) of 7-13-430 of the state law used to read: “There must be provided for each voting place where voting machines are used as many ballots as are equal to ten percent of the registered qualified voters at the voting place.” The statute was amended in 2000 to read: “There must be provided for each voting place where voting machines are used a number of ballots not to exceed ten percent of the registered qualified voters at the voting place.”

Sen. Phil Leventis, along with Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter and Rep. James Smith, requested that the Attorney General issue an opinion on the statute. “Our switch to electronic voting statewide in 2004 accentuates the need for a back-up system of paper ballots,” Leventis said. “The current statute has no minimum number of emergency ballots required, and does not protect our right to cast a ballot in the event of machine failure.” Leventis was opposed to the state’s purchase of the touch-screen computers that do not produce a durable, and voter-verifiable, paper ballot that can be used to verify a recount.

Beaufort County’s early voting was stymied on Oct. 6 when its computers failed to come online due to an incorrect password. The problem was detected Oct. 4 and not resolved until the afternoon of the 6th. The county blamed the State Election Commission for providing the wrong password. The SEC said Beaufort County election officials were to blame.

Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler recently called for emergency paper ballots to be used in case of long lines to vote on machines. Maryland, one of only three states (Georgia and Delaware) using paperless computer voting machines like those in South Carolina, has decided to dump the computers in 2010 and switch to an optical scan system that uses paper ballots that can be hand marked if the machines malfunction, or the electricity is off.

In Pennsylvania, voting rights advocates are pushing the Secretary of State to change his ruling that emergency ballots will not be used unless all the machines in a precinct fail, urging the paper ballots be distributed if half the machines aren’t working.

After the Horry County machine failure, State Republican Party Chair Kayton Dawson told CNN that he was confident of a “full and fair count” and noted that “there is always a back-up in case of a machine malfunction and a ballot can’t be cast.”

Leventis said, “Actually, there is no mandated back-up in case of machine failures, and that is why we have taken this matter to the Attorney General.”

“This Nov. 4 we expect to see record numbers of voters,” Bursey said. “If machines fail, as they have in the past, we shouldn’t have to rely on paper towels to insure that every vote counts.”

By Elke Kennedy
Sean’s Last Wish

This week, Americans are mourning the 10-year observance of the tragic murder of Matthew Shepard. It’s hard for any of us to relive the memories — a promising 21-year-old college student beaten to death and tied to a fence outside of Laramie, Wyo., just because he was gay.

Harder still for me. Watching the coverage of this high-profile case, I could not foresee that a similar tragedy would happen in my own family a few years later.

On May 16, 2007, my son Sean Kennedy was leaving a bar in Greenville. A car with three boys in it was parked outside the door, and one of them called Sean over, asking him for a cigarette. Sean gave him one and was walking away when Stephen Andrew Moeller got out, approached my son and called him anti-gay epithets. He punched him in the face, and Sean fell to the ground.

Sean’s murderer got back into the car and left my son dying there. A little later, he left a message on Sean’s friend’s phone: “You tell your faggot friend that when he wakes up he owes me $500 for my broken hand.” When I got to the hospital, the doctors told me that Sean’s injuries were not survivable because his brain had separated from his brain stem. Sean was pronounced brain dead at 11:20 that evening. He loved music, was happy with who he was and stood up for what he believed in. He wanted to be a Web designer. He was only 20 years old.

As hard as the stories of Matthew and Sean are to hear, they represent only two out of hundreds of violent incidents targeting gay and transgender people across the country.

Sadly, South Carolina’s absence of any hate crimes law makes gay and transgender residents more susceptible targets of such crimes. The FBI’s 2006 reporting found that 16 percent of hate crimes were based on sexual orientation — even more than crimes based on ethnicity or national origin. (South Carolina does not identify or track hate crimes statistics, so they are not included in national statistics.)

It is inexcusable in 2008 that South Carolina remains one of only five states in the country that does not have a hate crimes law. Tragically coincidental is the fact that Wyoming, where Matthew was murdered in 1998, also is among those five.

On June 11, Stephen Andrew Moeller was given a three-year sentence for Sean’s murder. Since he received credit for days served before he was released on bond, he will have to serve only 10 months in prison before he is eligible for parole. This shockingly short sentence sends the message that it is OK to attack and kill people just because you don’t like who they are. Justice was not done for my son.

Sean’s murder was not considered a hate crime because there is no such thing in our state. Every single one of our members of Congress also voted against the national Matthew Shepard Act, claiming that our state could handle these types of cases without federal laws. But this was certainly not so in Sean’s case.

We need a federal law to protect gay and transgender people such as Sean, but South Carolina can’t wait while Congress keeps stalling on an inclusive act and more young people like Sean are murdered. We must act now.

However, just changing our laws is not enough. We must change hearts and minds, and we must work together by embracing diversity, supporting and standing with each other and speaking out.

After Sean’s death, I founded Sean’s Last Wish (www.seanslastwish.com) to work on educating the public about the gaps in the law and the lack of protection. We educate about how bullying, intolerance, hatred and violence lead to these senseless crimes, and we provide information and resources about how everyone can help prevent hate crimes.

It’s time to honor Matthew’s and Sean’s legacies by sending this strong message: Bullying, hatred and violence have no place in our hearts, homes, churches, states and countries. No mother should ever have to bury her child. No mother should ever lose her child to hate and violence. No mother should ever have to fight for justice for her child.