Early voting could become permanent in SC following record absentee turnout in 2020
South Carolina voters will no longer need an excuse to vote early in person if a recently introduced House proposal becomes law.
The bill, which adds two weeks of early in-person voting, establishes a set number of early voting sites in each county and authorizes election officials to begin examining and tabulating absentee votes prior to Election Day, passed through a House panel Tuesday with bipartisan support after Republican lawmakers scrapped a number of the more controversial aspects of the legislation.
“I think voting should be as bipartisan as we can make it,” said state Rep. Brandon Newton, R-Lancaster, who sits on the Election Laws subcommittee. “I think there’s a lot of bipartisan support on having in-person early voting, some reforms to absentee voting and some changes that are made in this bill.”
The full House Judiciary Committee took up the bill Wednesday, but suspended its hearing after Chairman Chris Murphy, R-Dorchester, suffered a medical issue and was taken to the hospital. The meeting was adjourned prior to a vote on the bill and has not yet been rescheduled.
The amended bill creates a two-week period preceding elections where voters can cast ballots in person without an excuse.
Currently, voters may only cast absentee ballots in person or by mail if they meet certain criteria, such as being physically disabled or over age 65.
South Carolina smashed absentee voting records in 2020 after allowing no-excuse absentee voting in response to the coronavirus pandemic. A record 1.3 million South Carolinians voted absentee in the 2020 presidential election — roughly two-thirds of whom cast early in-person votes — more than 2 ½ times more than had ever voted absentee in any prior general election.
The bill advanced Tuesday makes permanent a two-week early in-person voting period that would run Monday through Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., and conclude on the Saturday immediately prior to the election.
The early voting period would be in effect for general elections, primaries, primary runoffs, special elections and municipal elections.
An excuse would still be required for voters who vote absentee by mail.
A county’s population and geographic size would dictate how many in-person early voting locations it has for general elections, up to a maximum of seven sites. No county would have fewer than two early voting locations for general elections, based on the bill’s criteria.
A provision in the original bill that required all early voting sites to be at least 10 miles apart was removed following pushback from public interest groups and county elections officials, who said the rule was not feasible for dense, urban counties. Instead, county election offices may place early voting sites where they see fit, providing the state elections director can move sites to ensure an appropriate and accessible distribution of locations throughout a county.
County election officials, not statute, would determine how many early voting sites are made available for primary, special and municipal elections.
Republicans also removed a requirement that voters requesting mail-in absentee ballots provide their South Carolina driver’s license number or a unique identification number from some other form of government-issued photo ID. The voter ID provision was replaced with a requirement that voters seeking mail-in ballots provide the last four digits of their Social Security number.
The bill also would allow election workers to begin processing mail-in absentee ballots a full day earlier than currently is permissible by statute, a change county election officials had requested.
It would permit election workers to examine the outer envelopes of returned absentee ballots on the Sunday immediately preceding election day and to begin counting absentee ballots the morning before election day.
Currently, election office workers must wait until the morning before the election to examine outer envelopes and cannot start tabulating absentee votes until election day.
Charleston County Elections Director Isaac Cramer told lawmakers earlier this month the changes to mail-in ballot processing would help alleviate the burden on election officials and allow them to report results more quickly.
“This has been a priority for us for many years,” he said. “Opening up the mail-in absentee ballots plays a huge factor in getting those results to you as fast as possible.”
In expediting the processing of absentee ballots, the bill adds a provision that forbids any election official from publicly reporting absentee ballot results before polls are closed.
If an official intentionally violates that rule, he could be charged with a felony and face a $1,000 fine or up to five years in prison.
Democrats criticized the provision criminalizing the early reporting of absentee voting results, calling it overly punitive.
”We don’t need to be creating more felonies like that,” said state Rep. Justin Bamberg, D-Bamberg, who spoke against the proposal Wednesday, arguing Republicans — who hold the majority in the Legislature — are creating legislation that sends the wrong message in South Carolina..
Senior editor Maayan Schechter contributed to this report.
This story was originally published February 17, 2022 at 1:04 PM.