Ballot rejections, Trump sign-stealing scandal sow distrust in SC county election
A yellow postal bin that volunteers say is filled to the brim with deficient absentee ballots sat for days in the Georgetown County elections office, a dispiriting reminder of the dozens of local residents whose votes won’t count this election amid confusion over South Carolina’s witness signature requirement.
The large number of unwitnessed ballots Georgetown has received, which some locals attribute to the instructions county officials provided voters, have been set aside, but won’t be counted without a reversal of policy by the South Carolina Election Commission.
Compounding the county’s ballot rejection problems, its longtime Election Board chairman and his wife, a veteran poll clerk and election trainer, resigned last month after allegedly being caught on video defacing and removing Donald Trump campaign signs from a Pawleys Island man’s yard.
Both situations threaten to cripple voter confidence in the local election process and underscore why large swaths of Americans say they’re concerned about the integrity of Tuesday’s election. They also serve to exemplify the escalating tug-of-war between voter access and election security that has emerged as a major partisan issue in national politics in recent years.
Democrats, on one hand, argue that Republican lawmakers attempt to suppress voter turnout — as low turnout is generally considered to favor Republican candidates — by instituting voter ID and witness signature requirements, limiting early or absentee voting and purging voter rolls, among other tactics.
Republicans argue such measures are essential to preventing voter fraud and ensuring a fair election.
The battle has played out in South Carolina this year in both the Legislature and the courts, with Democrats pushing to eliminate perceived impediments to voting and Republicans arguing that certain checks on voting are necessary.
A Democratic group currently has a lawsuit wending its way through the state’s federal court system that deals with ballot signature issues and the ability to “cure” or correct deficient absentee ballots. Meanwhile, a conservative law group has sued two Democratic-leaning counties for accepting private grant money to purchase voting equipment and hire poll workers because the funding came from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whom it alleges is trying to sway the election in favor of progressive candidates.
The judge who is presiding over the suits has denied preliminary injunctions in both cases.
‘Sounds like voter suppression to me’
Beverly Sullivan moved to Pawleys Island from Connecticut shortly before the 2016 general election.
She hadn’t been politically active in Connecticut, a solidly blue state, but upon arriving in Georgetown County in July of 2016, she immediately reached out to the local Democratic Party and asked what she could do to help.
“I voted in Connecticut, but I didn’t have to be involved. There wasn’t a need to be involved,” Sullivan said. “I don’t ever recall while in Connecticut that I was concerned about whether people’s votes counted or not.”
She did phone banking and data input for the Georgetown Democrats in 2016, joined a local social group for liberals and has participated in protest marches here and there over the past four years.
In mid-September, Sullivan began volunteering for the Georgetown County Voter Registration and Elections office. She estimates she’s spent about 30 hours since then packing absentee ballot envelopes, sorting through returned ballots and doing other clerical work.
In that time, Sullivan said she’s aware of at least four separate instruction sheets volunteers have stuffed into absentee ballots — one she received with her ballot in late September and three others she later tucked inside ballots herself — as the back-and-forth court battle over the the witness signature requirement ensued.
The first set of instructions, an orange sheet that Sullivan received with her own absentee ballot, doesn’t mention the witness signature, but does remind voters to sign their own name.
The second set is identical to the first, except for the addition of a parenthetical note underneath the signature reminder that reads “NO WITNESS SIGNATURE NEEDED.”
Sullivan said volunteers were instructed to black out the “NO” with marker, so the message instead read “WITNESS SIGNATURE NEEDED.”
An image of one of the inserts without the redaction that was apparently sent out in error made the rounds on social media last month. At the time, the elections director acknowledged that an unredacted ballot insert may have slipped out by mistake, but said it would have been an isolated incident.
Sullivan agreed and said she hadn’t heard that any unredacted inserts had been mailed out. She said she was more concerned about the third set of slips, light blue slivers of paper that told voters they did not need a witness to sign their ballot envelope.
Sullivan said she stuffed envelopes with the blue slips on Friday, Oct. 2, and believes hundreds of absentee ballots went out with them between then and Monday, Oct. 5.
The U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the witness signature requirement on the evening of Oct. 5, and the state stopped counting ballots received without witness signatures after Oct. 7.
Georgetown began mailing a white slip with ballots the day after the Supreme Court order that instructed voters a witness signature was now necessary, but by then it was too late, Sullivan contends.
It would be a “complete impossibility,” she said, that a Georgetown voter who was mailed an absentee ballot with the blue slip between Oct. 2 and Oct. 5 and heeded its advice could have received and returned their ballot by mail before the Oct. 7 deadline.
Only someone who returned their completed ballot in person might have been able to sneak in ahead of it and still have their vote counted, Sullivan said.
Many Georgetown voters were not so fortunate.
Sullivan said she personally processed 80 absentee ballots that came in without witness signatures in a single day the week after the requirement was reinstated, virtually all from the same batch of voters who received the blue instruction slips.
Some even wrote things like “I do not need a witness” on the outer envelope where the witness signature is supposed to go, she said.
Georgetown elections director Kristie Richardson declined to comment for this article, but told a local newspaper, The Coastal Observer, at the time that voters who returned ballots without witness signatures would be called and asked to come to the elections office to have their ballot witnessed.
That was the plan, Sullivan said, until Oct. 7 — two days after the Supreme Court ruling — when the State Election Commission intervened and instructed county elections offices they could not “cure” absentee ballots returned without witness signatures going forward.
“Their intention was to do what they could to correct this situation,” she said of Georgetown County. “At one point they were considering asking for extra volunteers to help them make phone calls to do just that, when they thought that they could do it.”
Prevented from allowing voters to fix their deficient ballots, county elections officials have set them aside in a plastic mail bucket inside the office in case they’re eventually given the go ahead to process them, Sullivan said.
“This sounds like voter suppression to me,” said Deborah Smith, who chairs the Georgetown County Democratic Party.
Smith said she thinks local elections officials could have been clearer in the instructions they mailed absentee voters, but mostly blames the problem on the State Election Commission, which she believes compounded the confusion over the on-again, off-again witness requirement by preventing voters from correcting their ballots.
“If people could correct them, it’d be OK,” Smith said Tuesday. “It’d be unfortunate, it’d be inconvenient, but we’re a week away and these votes are still not being addressed. I’m pretty angry about it.”
She said she’d heard from elections office volunteers that, as of last week, about 250 absentee ballots had been returned without witness signatures and said she’d personally fielded calls from voters who were turned away at the voter office after showing up to cure their ballots.
“It’s just infuriating ... that we’re going to lose votes because of this,” Smith said. “That anybody’s being denied the right to vote because of a problem the state created.”
Georgetown County isn’t the only county receiving absentee ballots without witness signatures.
As of Friday, it had the third highest rate of absentee ballot rejections in the state, according to data provided by the State Election Commission. About 2.4% of all county ballots that were mailed in, 162 in total, have been rejected for witness signature deficiencies, trailing Hampton and Clarendon counties, which have had 2.6% and 2.5% of ballots rejected for witness signature deficiencies, respectively. Agency spokesman Chris Whitmire acknowledged the data was incomplete because some counties have been late to report or have not reported rejection figures, but it is currently the best measure of how many ballots across the state have been rejected.
Election Commission: Supreme Court ruling forced rejections
State Sen. Ronnie Sabb, a Williamsburg Democrat whose district encompasses parts of Georgetown County, also blames the Election Commission for disenfranchising voters.
“I have a problem with the way that the State Election Commission handled it after the law changed,” he said. “Those voters should have been notified and given an opportunity to come down and right the wrong of their ballot so that their vote counts.”
Whitmire said the five-member Election Commission, which is appointed by the governor and must include one Republican and one Democrat, decided against allowing voters to cure their deficient ballots after consulting with attorneys about the Supreme Court ruling.
“The SEC concluded by vote of the membership that based on current state law and the U.S. Supreme Court order, county boards have no authority to allow voters to cure missing witness signatures,” he said.
Sabb, who is an attorney, said he’d also gotten that explanation from the Election Commission, but doesn’t agree with it.
“That explanation is unacceptable to me,” he said. “My advice would have been, let the voters vote. Let the voters’ votes count. All we’re worried about is fraud, we’re not interested in throwing out a vote based on a technicality, especially when we’ve got the law changing. That, to me, makes no sense.”
Sabb said that, in general, he sees no need for South Carolina to have a witness signature requirement — state elections chief Marci Andino actually recommended lawmakers waive it earlier this year — but he doesn’t necessarily oppose the requirement as long as voters are aware of it.
“If you knew to do it and didn’t do it, perhaps that could be considered a fatal flaw,” he said. “But if you don’t know to do it, I don’t know how you hold an individual to something they didn’t know to do. And that’s the part I think is wrong.”
Sabb said that while he does not view the Election Commission as an instrument of the Republican Party, he believes its actions are consistent with what he sees as the Republican Party’s national efforts to suppress voter turnout.
“I do see this as an issue of partisan politics,” he said. “I think that those making the decision did not make a decision consistent with every vote counting.”
A federal lawsuit filed earlier this month by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and a Beaufort County woman who was disenfranchised after mailing her absentee ballot back without a witness signature seeks an emergency order requiring that voters be allowed to cure their unsigned ballots.
Voting rights advocates are not optimistic about the lawsuit’s chances of success, however, after U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel last week denied both that emergency request and an essentially identical request made in a separate lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters of South Carolina.
‘It’s a public trust matter’
On the day before the Supreme Court reinstated South Carolina’s witness signature requirement, Dean and Rita Smith were in the summer resort town of Pawleys Island allegedly taking the law into their own hands.
The husband and wife, who had played prominent roles in Georgetown County’s election process for years, were allegedly caught on camera tampering with a neighbor’s Trump signs in the coastal community that voted more than 2-to-1 for the president in 2016.
Georgetown County as a whole favored Trump by more than 12 percentage points over Hillary Clinton.
The Smiths declined comment for this article when a reporter reached Rita Smith at the couple’s home, but told the Coastal Observer shortly after the incident that they regretted their actions and claimed they were not political.
“This really is a neighborhood issue,” Dean Smith, a 15-year member and then-chairman of the Georgetown elections board, told the Coastal Observer.
Rita Smith, who allegedly took one sign and defaced another by writing “Dump” above Trump’s name while her husband waited in their car, told the local paper she’d been enforcing the homeowners association policy that forbids yard signs and said the signs were in a common area not in the neighbor’s yard.
“Our emotions got the better of us,” Smith, the HOA president, told the paper.
Unbeknownst to the Smiths, the neighbor had trained a deer camera on the area to try to catch a glimpse of whomever had been repeatedly taking his lawn signs.
Local GOP officials posted the images on social media and multiple people quickly identified the Smiths as the culprits, said Jerry Rovner, chairman of the 7th Congressional District GOP.
On Oct. 12, Rovner and Georgetown County Republican Party chair Karol Anderson filed a police report implicating the Smiths in the lawn sign subterfuge.
Dean and Rita Smith, who had been a poll clerk and local elections training coordinator, resigned from their county roles two days later.
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division is investigating the allegations against the couple, but neither has been charged with a crime, an agency spokesman said Friday.
Rovner said he hadn’t initially planned to press charges over the signs, but after learning the Smiths held significant roles at the Georgetown County elections office he changed his mind.
“If you’re in charge of the polling place, you’re supposed to be neutral,” he said of Rita Smith, whom he’d learned had the words “All In for Biden/Harris” overlaid on her Facebook profile photo and ran the local chapter of a social club for liberals where she’d recently encouraged members to dishonestly reserve tickets to a Trump rally in New Jersey to depress turnout.
Smith has given $4,000 to Democratic candidates in four U.S. Senate races this year, according to OpenSecrets.org, but has not donated to candidates in any South Carolina races. There is no record that her husband has made any political contributions.
Robert Kochie, a vocal Trump-supporting neighbor of the Smiths, said Rita Smith had earlier this year made a donation to Planned Parenthood in his name after he refused her request to remove a Trump flag from his property.
He said he learned of Smith’s covert contribution upon receiving a letter from the reproductive health organization notifying him of the “generous and thoughtful” contribution she’d made in his honor.
Kochie, who showed the letter to a reporter, said the gesture upset him because he’s “pro-life to the hilt” and called the move petty and spiteful.
Whitmire, the State Election Commission spokesman, said he’d never heard of anything like what the Smiths are alleged to have done.
“What we train county election officials, county board members is that you have to set aside any political views, party allegiances, candidate allegiances when you work in elections,” he said. “And, for me, the big reason for that is public perception and trust in elections.”
When election officials violate their pledge of neutrality, it reflects negatively on the election process in the county and across the entire state, Whitmire said.
Georgetown elections board vice chair Billy Altman and other local Democratic officials and legislators said they were floored by the sign-stealing allegations and had always known the Smiths to comport themselves professionally and without political prejudice.
“It was a shock to the board and the community because Dean and Rita Smith have been an extremely valuable asset to the election process in Georgetown County for the last 15 years,” Altman said. “This one incident is certainly an anomaly and it was with real regret that we lost the services of those two folks.”
Many local officials, including Republican ones, said the accusations were troubling but had not shaken their faith in the integrity of the local election process.
Rovner, however, said he has his doubts about what could have played out had the Smiths not been implicated in the sign theft and retained their roles.
“What scares me is how much undue influence people in that position of power have when they’re obviously predisposed in one direction,” he said. “It’s a public trust matter, it’s just that simple ... Do you want to trust the election process or not?”
State Sen. Stephen Goldfinch, a Murrells Inlet Republican whose district includes Georgetown County, said the situation was reflective of a growing partisan antipathy that’s negatively affecting politics and the country at large.
“It’s just not healthy for America,” he said. “A little bit of partisanship and some back-and-forth exchange of ideas and debate is a good thing. But hyper-partisanship where you have this type of thing going on and you can’t even find non-partisan people to run an election is a real problem. It’s a problem for democracy and it’s a problem for America.”
This story was produced with a tip reported to the Election Protection hotline, which shares data with ProPublica’s Electionland project. If you witness or experience a problem voting, please let us know.
This story was originally published November 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM.