This week in the war on voting: SC officials omit voter ID info; Dems object to WV's new ID law

Welcome to our war on voting series, a joint project of Joan McCarter and Meteor Blades.

It should be a source of amazement and disgust to every American when efforts are made to suppress other Americans’ access to the ballot. People lost their lives in the long struggle to extend the vote to everyone beyond property-owning white men. Nonetheless, some high muckety-mucks still have no qualms about making it difficult for certain people to vote, those certain people being the poor, people of color, youth—young women especially, and elders. 

Progressives don’t believe in cruel and unusual punishments, but it’s not easy to keep tar and feathers out of mind when thinking about the mostly Republican elected officials who seek to curtail these voters because they know that shaving a couple of percentage points off the turnout can mean victory for their side.

For South Carolina’s Republican primary today and the Democratic primary next week, officials have chosen one of the easiest ways to suppress the vote: Information omission.

As Kira Lerner at Think Progress reports, South Carolina’s voter ID law is not as tough as most other states. While voters will be asked to show an approved photo ID, they can still cast a ballot with their voter registration card if they sign an affidavit explaining why there was a “reasonable impediment” to their obtaining a photo ID. And their ballot will be counted. And people who leave their photo ID at home can cast a provisional ballot.

All well and good except that state officials, including Gov. Nikki Haley, are not telling voters about these provisions. Thus, they’re making it seem as if a voter ID is absolutely required. Some people will likely not show up to vote because they lack any of the photo IDs that are allowed, or they will vote because they’re confused about what they need. Either way, the officials who are playing this game are no friend to democracy.

Back before the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to gut a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, South Carolina was one of the states required by past discrimination to get any changes in its voting laws cleared in advance by the U.S. Department of Justice. 

In 2011, when the Republican-controlled state government tried to get a voter ID law “pre-cleared” in this way, the DOJ said no on the grounds that the law would discriminate against minority citizens because they would be 20 percent more likely not to possess a photo ID. The department’s Civil Rights Division noted that 81,938 minority citizens already registered to vote did not have proper ID based on the state’s own records. South Carolina then resubmitted the voter ID law in 2012 with the “reasonable impediment” clause included. Had officials there waited for the 2013 Supreme Court decision wrecking a big part of the Voting Rights Act, they could probably have gotten away without making that improvement.

Now they’re weakening that provision by only letting voters who read the fine print know about it.