Category Archives: Lynn Teague

Teague: South Carolina’s Election Commission: Troubled Waters

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The Op-Ed Page

Lynn Teague
Guest Columnist

The South Carolina State Election Commission (SEC, not to be confused with anything athletic) has been in the news a lot in the past week, following the removal of Director Howard Knapp by a 3-2 vote of the commissioners last Wednesday. There had been reports of a SLED investigation involving Knapp, but no specific information.

Howard Knapp

This came during a period of uncertainty regarding the SEC’s response to the demands of the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) for our voter rolls, including sensitive personal information. The feds don’t have an impeccable record of data security of late, and this seems both not necessary (our rolls are already checked against federal databases to identify non-citizens and against multiple sources for other verifications) and a potential source of data exposure.

All of this has been further complicated by the firing of the Assistant Director of the SEC over a voice-activated recording device left, intentionally or not, in an SEC training and meeting room.

This turmoil has led to many questions. The first is whether voters should be panicked about what is happening, given elections that are coming soon. Should we panic about either the voting conditions or the integrity of the elections? This one is easy to answer.

Lynn Teague

We can expect the usual human glitches: the poll worker who forgets the key to the polling place and delays opening, the ballot marking device that won’t function, and similar technical problems. We should not expect anything else. At both the state and county levels, the people who make elections work on a day-to-day basis will continue to do the work that they know very well. They will conduct elections designed to count and report every vote, accurately. Furthermore, they will not be rudderless; they will be overseen by our bipartisan election commissioners.

However, this is followed by longer-term concerns. The privacy of our voter records is one of these. This issue is currently in court, in a case before Judge Daniel Coble in Columbia on 26 September. The data security issues around federal systems have already been mentioned.

In addition, it is here that the most important long-term issue arises: Is the South Carolina SEC the independent agency governed by appointed commissioners that we have believed that we have, or is it more vulnerable to political pressures? Commissioners are appointed by the governor, but during their terms cannot be removed except for cause. This is designed to insulate them from passing political storms.

We know that pressure from elected officlals is not unprecedented in the history of the SEC. The departure of the previous director, Marci Andino, followed some very angry comments from legislators who were disturbed by her letter suggesting an array of accommodations for voters during the pandemic. However, that what an exception to the history of the agency. On the whole, the South Carolina election management system contrasts markedly, and very favorably, with states where a partisan official oversees elections.

We should all hope that it stays that way, that South Carolina continues to preserve some measure of distance between partisan politics and the administration of what absolutely must be a non-partisan process, our elections. Politics today is highly adversarial and often becomes performance art, designed to get attention for the official or the official’s party rather than to achieve something substantive. Our elections should not be driven astray in those ugly winds.

Meanwhile, voters should check their registrations at scvotes.gov at least 30 days before elections. They should consult the League of Women Voters’ Vote411, where there is an abundance of election information, including candidate statements in their own words, not edited by anyone.

But after all that is done, we should hope that everyone will keep an eye on the General Assembly. The disturbances at the SEC are not a sound rationale for changing our election administration to one administered by partisan officials or in any way more vulnerable to manipulation. We should all be able to continue to vote with confidence that our votes are accurately tabulated and reported in a process that is not biased toward outcomes for one party or another (other than in redistricting, but that is another subject).

Lynn Teague is a retired archaeologist who works hard every day in public service. She is the legislative lobbyist for the South Carolina League of Women Voters.

Teague: No-Excuse Early Voting – with Trip Wires

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The Op-Ed Page

By Lynn Teague
Guest Columnist

An early voting bill, H.4919, will be heard in the House Election Laws Subcommittee on Wednesday, Feb. 9, after adjournment of the House. The bill’s two-week early in-person voting period for all qualified electors is very welcome, but it also includes some very problematic provisions.

The greatest issue is that the General Assembly is once more trying to micro-manage local government by dictating the locations of early polling places. Their formula establishing the overall number of polling places in a county based on both population and geography is fine. However, they didn’t stop there. The bill requires that early polling places include the county election office, and that no early polling location be within 10 miles of another.

This 10-mile limit would lead to very disproportionate numbers of voters attempting to use single polling places in urban centers. Richland County, for example, would be forced to accommodate up to several hundred thousand voters in Columbia’s one location – the Harden Street election office, where space, parking, and access are problematic. Other polling places would be as far away as Hopkins. The numbers of voting-age persons within the 10-mile radius around the election offices in Richland, Charleston and Greenville counties is more than 200,000 each. While some city voters might migrate out to Hopkins or Hollywood or Fountain Inn to vote, the central urban polling places would be badly stressed. Further, the state’s largest minority communities would be within the areas most affected by overcrowding and its attendant impediments to voting.

The bill further requires that applications for absentee ballots include voter identification numbers that can be taken from a range of government issued photo identifications, from passports to military identifications. However, election offices have no access to the databases of most of these numbers, so they cannot be verified. This provision would simply lead to ballots being discarded if the number is absent. On the other hand, Texas has attempted a badly designed system of verifying ID numbers on absentee ballot applications that has led to discarding high percentages of applications (20-50%). It is important that South Carolina not follow in that state’s footsteps. In the absence of any evidence that there is a real problem to be solved, this provision should be deleted, because it would harm qualified electors without providing any added election security.

Finally, South Carolina should have “notice and cure” for absentee ballots, so that voters are notified if their absentee application or absentee ballots are found defective. Voters should be aware of and able to correct deficiencies so that their votes are counted. After all, this would simply allow the greatest number of qualified electors to fulfill their civic responsibility in the way dictated by the General Assembly.

There are many other provisions of interest, which can be explored at https://www.scstatehouse.gov/billsearch.php?billnumbers=4919. Anyone who would like to let the House Election Laws Subcommittee know their thoughts on this bill should email them as soon as possible at HJudElectionLaws@schouse.gov. We need accessible and secure elections that are fair to all.

Lynn Teague is a retired archaeologist who works hard every day in public service. She is the legislative lobbyist for the South Carolina League of Women Voters.

Time runs short to testify on redistricting!

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The Op-Ed Page

By Lynn Teague
Guest Columnist

Time is running short to make your thoughts known on South Carolina’s redistricting, the process of adjusting our legislative districts to 2020 census data. The resulting maps will be in place for the next decade. Many citizens of South Carolina feel that they are not represented in the General Assembly or in Congress. Redistricting is a significant contributor to that. If a district has been distorted to make it “safe” for the incumbent, help make it better by identifying what you think should be considered in drawing districts.

Lynn Teague

Help ensure that legislators know about the important communities of which you are a member when they draw legislative districts. Do you want an S.C. House district that doesn’t break up your county or city? Do you want a House district that leaves your neighborhood or an area with a shared economic foundation intact? Do you want a Congressional district that meets Voting Rights Act requirements, but isn’t stretched out across most of the state to pack in every possible minority voter? You need to tell legislators about it now.

S.C. Senate hearings around the state have been completed, but the last few S.C. House hearings remain and are taking testimony relevant to Congressional and S.C. House maps. The House hearing schedule is posted at https://redistricting.schouse.gov/docs/Public%20Hearing%20Schedule.pdf. The last in-person-only opportunity for oral testimony was last night, Sept. 22, in Orangeburg.

There are now two meetings at which virtual oral testimony will be accepted. The first virtual opportunity is now scheduled for Tuesday, September 28, at 4:30-8:30 PM in the Blatt Building, 1105 Pendleton St., Room 110. The second is scheduled for Monday, October 4, at the same time and place. To sign up for virtual testimony on either date, email virtualtestimony@schouse.gov and specify the date that you wish to testify.

In addition, written testimony can be submitted to redistricting@schouse.gov.

Speak up, in whatever way you choose to do it! Redistricting may determine whether you have a meaningful vote when you go into a voting booth in November, and whether you have legislators who consider your interests and respond to your concerns.

Lynn Teague is a retired archaeologist who works hard every day in public service. She is the legislative lobbyist for the South Carolina League of Women Voters.

Teague: Math and Redistricting: Diagnosing a problem

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The Op-Ed Page

An image from the presentation Lynn links to in the last graf.

An image from the presentation Lynn links to in the last paragraph.

By Lynn Teague
Guest Columnist

Brad drew my attention to an article in The Washington Post about mathematics and
redistricting. This brought to mind some important math about South Carolina’s current
legislative districts. The majority of South Carolina’s legislative districts are non-competitive in
the general election. The winning candidate is selected in the primary in June. This makes
November elections meaningless in many cases and encourages polarization, since highly
engaged and often extreme voters are especially likely to participate in primaries. It also seems
odd, since we know that in S.C. statewide races the majority party draws about 55% of the vote,
while they now control a super-majority in the Senate and House. The most common
explanation for this disparity in proportions is partisan gerrymandering.

However, you can’t fix a problem if you don’t know what the problem really is, and guessing
isn’t good enough. Even well-designed districts can look odd, and gerrymandered districts can
look okay. An eyeball test isn’t enough. So, League of Women Voters of South Carolina board
member Matthew Saltzman supervised a Clemson grad student thesis to evaluate whether our
districts meet mathematical tests of partisan gerrymandering. Anna Marie Vagnozzi used a test
originally employed in the 2017 case League of Women Voters v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Vagnozzi generated millions of maps and found that the current S.C. maps do not fall at the extremes of the resulting distribution and do not seem to have been pushed to extremes by partisan bias. Instead, they fall very much where the presumably fair post-litigation Pennsylvania maps do.

So, why are South Carolina’s maps so non-competitive? Some of this arises from demography.
South Carolina retains a significant level of racial polarization in voting, so the tendency of black
voting-age populations to be concentrated in some areas, especially urban centers, is a major factor. Votes are wasted when a group of voters are clustered together in such high numbers that their district would have been won by the same party without many of them. White populations are more evenly distributed throughout the state and this provides an automatic electoral advantage, giving them greater voting strength with fewer votes wasted.

The other big factor is incumbent protection. Incumbents of both parties have engineered their
districts to be “safe.” They have amplified the differences caused by demography to create even
more extreme differences by carefully choosing their boundaries to include neighborhoods favorable to them and exclude others. This bipartisan process, repeated through successive redistricting cycles, has led to some excessively predictable districts. (Bipartisanship is not always the Holy Grail of good politics.)

A very recent presentation on redistricting in South Carolina is posted on-line at the League website. It includes maps of our noncompetitive districts as well as a short summary of Vagnozzi’s research and discussion of where we are in the redistricting process.

Lynn Teague is a retired archaeologist who works hard every day in public service. She is the legislative lobbyist for the South Carolina League of Women Voters.