Two weeks after Election Day, the South Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit alleging that the state Department of Motor Vehicles unlawfully denied voter registration opportunities to thousands of eligible South Carolinians.
The scope of the problem is “unclear” but “mind-boggling,” the ACLU said.
In the past 13 months alone, the South Carolina DMV has denied voter registration to 17,564 South Carolinians who were 17 years old at the time but would have been 18 and eligible to vote in the next election, according to the national civil rights organization. organization.
When applying for a South Carolina driver’s license, eligible voters are given the opportunity by law to register to vote, including those who are 17 but will be 18 in the next election.
That information must then be reported to the South Carolina Election Commission within 10 days, according to the lawsuit. But this didn’t happen for thousands of eligible 17-year-olds. Many of them indicated on their DMV forms that they wanted to register to vote, but they never received the correct forms, the ACLU said.
That’s because the DMV “has a pattern and practice of screening registrants based on age,” the lawsuit said.
The allegations were made in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Richland County Common Square Court by the national nonprofit and its local chapter against the state DMV and the state Election Commission.
An accompanying request for a preliminary injunction asks a judge to order the state DMV to stop screening 17-year-olds who are eligible to vote, and for the Board of Elections to add the excluded voters to their rolls retroactively to the time when they should have been voted on. given a request.
“The South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles is aware of the concerns raised in the ACLU lawsuit,” said Mike Fitts, the public information officer for the South Carolina DMV. “The agency is working with the State Election Commission on possible ways to resolve the issue. Additionally, the SCDMV encourages SC residents to verify their voter registration information through the State Election Commission website at scvotes.gov.”
The South Carolina DMV voluntarily searched its database and found the approximately 17,000 people who had been unable to register or whose registrations were never reported to the election board, the ACLU said. It also noted that about 6,000 of those people were able to register to vote through other means.
“We appreciate SCDMV’s candor and the agency’s willingness to identify affected voters,” said Allen Chaney, legal director of the ACLU of South Carolina. “I am hopeful that the court will order the election commission to add these thousands of young, new voters to the electoral rolls so that they can cast their votes on election day.”
In its lawsuit, however, the ACLU said the state election commission “has refused to consider individuals affected by SCDMV’s unlawful exclusion of 17-year-olds.”
When reached, a spokesperson for the State Election Commission said it was aware of the lawsuit but did not comment on active litigation.
