SC teenagers will not be able to vote after a bug blocked registration

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A judge in South Carolina ruled Friday that it was too late to open voter registration for nearly 1,900 teenagers after the state Department of Motor Vehicles failed to notify election officials that they had checked the box to register. , when they got their driver’s license.

The teens were 17 when they went to the DMV, but they will be 18 by Election Day. A glitch in the DMV’s computers did not identify the teens as qualified or provide them with an additional electronic form to prove they were citizens and not criminals, and otherwise have the right to vote.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued to reopen the registration on Tuesday, a day after early voting opened in South Carolina. They provided several possible ways for teenagers to register and be allowed to vote.

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But Judge Daniel Coble said Election Day is too close to do anything so drastic as to change the voting rolls.

“This Court could not provide any effective judicial protection, and even if it attempted to do so, the requested protection would create a mess in the voting system,” Coble wrote in his decision about five hours after hearing arguments.

Coble represented lawyers for the South Carolina Election Commission, SCDMV, the General Assembly and the governor’s office. All of them said that while they sympathized with teenagers who might have missed their first chance to vote for president, it was simply too late to address registration issues with county election offices busy with early voting.

It is necessary to identify potential voters, verify their right to vote and add them to the lists. “None of this can happen before the general election,” said Michael Burkstead, a lawyer for the state Board of Elections.

About 6,000 additional teens affected by the glitch were still able to sign up after checking to see that the process hadn’t been completed and they weren’t on the list, including a 17-year-old who exposed the problem and told his mom. which then let the Democratic legislator know what was going on that prompted the lawsuit.

No other teenagers who wanted to vote but were not registered have been publicly identified.

On Tuesday, Gov. Henry McMaster held a signing ceremony for a bill banning South Carolina's...

Attorneys for the state said the burden should have been placed on the teenagers to make sure they could vote by the registration deadline earlier this month.

ACLU officials said that as first-time voters, they may not have known that clicking the box that said “yes, I want to register” meant they would not be registered.

“Our government failed these young voters and now the same government is making excuses instead of fixing things. When “It’s too hard to fix” becomes an acceptable reason to disenfranchise voters, we know there’s work to be done,” ACLU of South Carolina Legal Director Allen Chaney said in a statement after the ruling.

In the first four days of early voting in South Carolina, more than 511,000 votes were cast, or about 15% of all eligible voters.

Earlier this month, Coble decided to extend the registration deadline by about a week because of extensive damage and power outages from Hurricane Helen. From the bench on Friday, he said it was “an act of God, not an act of man.”

The DMV worked with the ACLU to try to determine the extent of the problem. They had to individually review each application that met the instructions to see if the teenager checked the box to register to vote.

And all the lawyers in the state said they will work to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“We share with the ACLU the goal of free, fair, safe and secure elections,” said Kevin Hall, attorney for South Carolina Senate President Thomas Alexander.

But the ACLU said excluding anyone because of a government mistake is unfair.

“This is a case about a fundamental constitutional right,” Cheney said in court on Friday. “First-time voters will be wrongfully excluded from a historic election.”