South Carolina smashes absentee voting record with 2 weeks still until Election Day
An unprecedented number of South Carolinians are taking advantage of “no excuses” absentee voting to cast their ballots early this election cycle.
With two weeks still remaining until Election Day, the state on Monday surpassed 535,000 absentee ballots cast, eclipsing its previous record of 502,819, set in the 2016 general election.
“Based on the current rate of by mail and in person absentee voting, we are on course for approximately one million ballots to be cast before Election Day,” South Carolina Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said.
If South Carolina hits the 1 million mark, it would mean about 40% of votes will be cast in advance of the election, assuming typical turnout. By comparison, 23.7% of votes were cast early in the 2016 general election and 22.5% were cast early in the June primary.
Of the 535,244 absentee votes recorded, as of Monday, 298,812 had been cast in-person and 236,432 by mail.
Absentee-by-mail voting, up nearly 80% from 2016, has been the primary driver behind the spike in early voting.
Gains in by-mail voting are largely attributable to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, which has deterred voters, especially those vulnerable to the disease, from risking their health by casting ballots in person this cycle.
The expansion in early voting was made possible by a bill South Carolina lawmakers approved last month in response to COVID-19 that allowed for “no excuses” absentee voting, which meant that all registered voters could cast absentee ballots in the 2020 general election.
Historically, absentee voting has only been an option for members of the armed forces, seniors, the physically disabled and a relatively limited number of people who fall into 14 other explicit categories.
To counter the anticipated deluge of absentee ballots, the law permits county offices to begin opening the outer envelopes of ballots two days before the election and to start counting those ballots at 7 a.m. on Election Day.
Some counties also have purchased automatic letter openers and high-speed ballot scanners to speed the vote-counting process along, Whitmire said.
The Election Commission’s plan, he said, is to have all votes counted on election night. But given the extraordinarily high volume of absentee-by-mail ballots anticipated, that might not be possible.
“I think there will be a lot of counties that get done just fine on election night,” Whitmire said. “It’s certainly possible (some don’t). But I also don’t envision anything that’s going on for days and days.”
South Carolina’s surge in early voting mirrors the rest of the country where, as of Tuesday, nearly 34 million Americans had voted early, according to the U.S. Elections Project, a turnout-tracking database maintained by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald.
According to the database, Democratic Party voters have been casting early ballots at a much higher clip than Republicans.
Based on party registration statistics from the 19 states that provide them — excluding South Carolina, which does not have registration by party — about 53% of voters who have cast ballots early are registered Democrats compared to only 25.2% who are registered Republicans, according to the U.S. Elections Project. The vast majority of the remaining early voters have no party affiliation, according to the database.
This story was originally published October 20, 2020 at 12:22 PM.