Can I Get a Witness? Voter Fraud in SC
If this is Thursday in South Carolina that must mean I am required to obtain the signature of a witness if I want to vote by mail in the upcoming election. But, wait, if it’s Friday, a witness may no longer be required.
This ping pong game has been ricocheting in the state legislature and federal courts for months now. Two weeks ago, a federal district judge overruled the requirement for witness signatures that the state’s Republican legislators imposed when revising election rules supposedly to accommodate voters in the COVID-19 era. The GOP appealed, and last Thursday a federal appeals court panel reinstated the need for witnesses. Until Friday, when the full 4th Circuit Court of Appeals “temporarily” struck down the signature requirement.
On Monday, the state’s election commission website confirmed that it’s as confused as we voters are, posting: “at this time, a court has ruled you do not need a witness signature on your ballot to count. However, it is possible this court ruling could change.”
Going to the horse’s mouth, I telephoned the election commission in Charleston County, where I vote. The woman I spoke with was friendly. I could tell she wanted to help me vote, but apparently she was a day behind. “Oh no,” she said in her delightful Low-country accent. “You have to have a witness. That’s what the court said.”
Enough already! I’m starting to take this personally. Forget politics for a moment and assume you have no idea who I am likely to vote for (although careful readers of this column can have no doubt). Let’s just say I’m a guy of a certain age, who has a reasonable concern about not contracting COVID-19 (which has killed more than 3,000 South Carolinians). I use the post office regularly, which, until recently, I trusted implicitly. When I requested my application for a mail-in absentee ballot in August, the election commission website made it all sound so straightforward.
Now ballots are due to be mailed out, with instructions, on Oct. 2, which is a week from Friday. But who’s counting?
If sowing confusion around our country’s election process has become the core strategy of President Trump’s Republican Party in 2020, South Carolina’s chapter should get a presidential gold star for its efforts.
What’s this really all about? In plain English: voter suppression. Last February, South Carolina Republicans watched in horror as a combination of African-American voters and a swarm of retirees who moved here from “off” turned out in droves to save former Vice President Joe Biden’s faltering campaign and vault him to the eventual nomination ahead of President Trump’s hoped-for opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Some 528,000 voters showed up, a 30% increase from 2016. Of those voters, 60% were Black, and Biden won 61% of their votes. The number of voters over 64 also doubled from 2016, and Biden won them as well.
Despite the Republicans’ argument, this idea of putting as many possible tripwires into the voting process has nothing to do with potential absentee ballot fraud, and if it did, requiring a witness would make no difference.
The last major instance of ballot harvesting at scale occurred two years ago in neighboring North Carolina, where Mark Harris, a pastor running as a Republican for the 9th Congressional seat hired a convicted felon named L. McCrae Dowless Jr., to boost his effort. Harris won by 900 votes, but the election was overturned when it came to light that Dowless had been paying a team of door-to-door solicitors to procure and witness the ballots of locals in poverty-stricken Bladen County. Requiring a witness provides no protection from fraud, but it does add a potential cause for rejecting a ballot.
I don’t think South Carolina Republicans really believe there’s any danger of Democrats organizing a fraudulent election, nor do I think they’re worried about President Trump not carrying the state and its piddling nine electoral votes.
Mainly, I think they’re playing Trump-see, Trump-do by sounding the fraud alarm. But I also think they’re concerned that an unprecedented turnout by African-American and retiree voters could topple their senior senator, Lindsey Graham, currently polling neck-and-neck with his African-American challenger, Jaime Harrison.
Personally, I’m not buying their unspoken theory that the only people who will be angered and confused by this inexcusable circus are either Black or old. I think plenty of Republicans are likely to screw it up too. And I know plenty of Democrats who have scrapped their plans to vote by mail just to make doubly sure their vote counts in this election. Like me, they’re mad as hell.
This story was originally published September 30, 2020 at 7:37 AM.