The highlight of
last week's War on Voting was South Carolina's Attorney General Alan Wilson claiming that 900 dead people voted in "recent" elections in his state based on data from the DMV. The South Carolina legislature, of course, jumped on the claim.
Remember, the Department of Justice has blocked South Carolina from implementing a voter ID bill passed last year under the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the new law would create an unconstitutional impediment to voting by certain groups. The state is fighting back, hence this hearing. Which didn't go exactly as planned.
State Election Commission director Marci Andino testified that some of the voters the DMV data said were dead are very much alive – and were eligible to cast a ballot. [...]
In a news release that election agency spokesman Chris Whitmire handed out prior to the hearing, the agency disputed the claim that dead people had voted. One allegedly dead voter on the DMV's list cast an absentee ballot before dying; another was the result of a poll worker mistakenly marking the voter as his deceased father; two were clerical errors resulting from stray marks on voter registration lists detected by a scanner; two others resulted from poll managers incorrectly marking the name of the voter in question instead of the voter above or below on the list.
The attorney general's office had only given the State Election Commission six names off its list of 950 or so names to examine. The agency found every one of them to be alive and otherwise eligible to vote, except for the one who had voted before dying.
They were only able to examine six names, because that's all the AG's office would give them. In fact, they appear to be trying to keep the list a big secret. State Senate Democratic Caucus Director Phil Bailey told the reporter "that only Republicans so far have been able to view it." Even better, the updates to that story:
UPDATE:
Mark Plowden, spokesman for the S.C. Attorney General's Office, says the six names checked by the S.C. Election Commission did not come from the list obtained by the State Law Enforcment Division.
S.C. Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire, however, says the names came from the list in question.
UPDATE II:
Free Times has confirmed that the six names examined by the State Election Commission came from the list SLED is investigating.
True to Republican form, Nikki Haley and her underlings will do or say anything.
Take the jump to see the rest of the news.
In other news: