This what democracy looks like in SC. Election workers quitting because of the Big Lie
The damage of the Big Lie on South Carolina is coming into sharper focus.
The picture we see is of a wounded democracy whose limbs and organs are battered by false claims pushed by many South Carolina Republicans that the 2020 national election was rigged. Those limbs and organs of democracy are threatened with failing.
The latest laceration to be discovered post-2020 is to county election director positions in South Carolina.
As The State’s Zak Koeske and Joe Bustos reported, 22 election directors across 19 counties left their jobs since 2020. That’s nearly half of South Carolina’s 46 counties. Seventeen of those counties now have replacements who have never led elections before.
County election directors are in charge of ensuring that polling places are open, people are able to vote and ballots are counted. The directors lead the staffs that do all the work to make an election happen.
“Escalating attacks on the integrity of the election system, intensifying political divisions in the country and excessive job-related stress were among the top reasons (election officials across the U.S.) cited for leaving the profession, according to the survey conducted on behalf of the Brennan Center for Justice,” Koeske and Bustos reported.
“The polarized political climate and persistence of discredited 2020 election fraud claims played a role for some, but not all directors,” who left jobs in South Carolina, the reporters wrote.
South Carolina Republicans who perpetuated the myth of election fraud should feel ashamed that any election directors felt the need to leave their jobs because of hostility created by those lies.
That is, if they can feel shame at all about trying to destroy democratic institutions.
More and more, it seems the many conservatives in South Carolina and across the country have endeavored to tear apart democracy, shamelessly knifing it up so their party can win with zero scruples about the consequences of their Machiavellian actions.
A few years before 2020, then-Gov. Nikki Haley questioned the integrity of the state’s elections, positing that people using the names of dead people were voting and that polls weren’t secure. State studies showed no such things were true. Nonetheless, in the name of “election security,” our Republican-dominated state passed a voter ID law that negatively effected minority residents and typical Democratic voters.
After the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and national Republicans built on the dishonest charges about elections that Haley, South Carolina’s Republican Party and other Republican leaders across the country had pushed.
South Carolina’s senior United States Senator, Republican Lindsey Graham, went on a public crusade to try to uncover election fraud. Although he was unsuccessful, Graham nonetheless lent legitimacy to the absurd assertion. In Congress, five of seven South Carolina representatives, all Republicans, bolstered the Big Lie by voting against certifying the presidential election.
With 17 directors across South Carolina leading election day proceedings this year for the first time this year, and what is surely a similar amount of newcomers in other states, it seems a grim possibility that Republicans will question the integrity of any elections they don’t win based on directors lacking experience.
Can American democracy sustain another attack? If not, what happens next? When does undercutting democracy devolve into a tyrannical form of government not seen before in the U.S.? Are we watching a new Jim Crow-era return to the South in the form of voting restrictions passed in the name of “security?”
A more fundamental question may be this: Has a certain segment of the Republican Party lost basic decency?
Read what Todd Billman, the former Dorchester County election director who left after the 2020 election, told The State.
“People like me are now seen as the problem, not part of the solution,” Billman said. “I always wanted to be part of the solution, and at this point, I didn’t see that changing because of the political climate.”
Billman surely expressed what many county election directors across the state felt before resigning.
Election workers with honest intent should never feel like they’re part of any problem. Those who make the workers feel that way are the actual problem. It’s obvious who they are.