SC teenagers will not be able to vote after errors blocked registration

COLUMBIA, SC (AP) — A South Carolina judge ruled Friday that it was too late to reopen 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 record when they received their driver’s licenses.

The teenagers were 17 when they went to the DMV, but would turn 18 by Election Day. An error in the DMV’s computers did not identify the teenagers as qualified and did not present them with an additional electronic form certifying that they are citizens, not felons, and otherwise qualified to vote.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued to reopen registration Tuesday, a day after early voting began in South Carolina. They offered several possible ways that teenagers could register and be allowed to vote.

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But Judge Daniel Coble said it was too close to Election Day to do anything so drastic as to alter the voting rolls.

“There is no effective relief that this Court could grant, and even if it tried, the requested relief would create disorder in the voting system,” Coble wrote in his ruling about five hours after hearing arguments.

Coble was joined by attorneys for the South Carolina Election Commission, SCDMV, the General Assembly and the Governor’s Office. All said that while they were sympathetic to teenagers who might miss their first chance to vote for president, it was too late to fix registration issues with county election offices busy with early voting.

Potential voters must be identified, checked for eligibility and added to the rolls. “None of this can happen before this general election,” said state Election Commission attorney Michael Burchstead.

About 6,000 additional teenagers affected by the error were still able to register after checking and seeing that the process had not been completed and were not on the lists, including the 17-year-old who exposed the problem and notified his mother, who then let a Democrat lawmaker know what’s going on, which prompted the lawsuit.

No other teenagers who wanted to vote but did not register have been publicly identified.

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Attorneys for the state said a burden should have been placed on teenagers to make sure they were able to vote before the registration deadline earlier this month.

The ACLU said that as first-time voters, they may not have known that clicking a box that said “yes, I want to register” meant they wouldn’t be registered.

“Our government failed these young voters and now the same government is making excuses instead of making things right. 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 percent of all eligible voters.

Coble decided earlier this month to extend the registration deadline by about a week because of widespread damage and power outages from Hurricane Helene. He stressed from the bench on Friday that it was “an act of God, not an act of man”.

The DMV worked with the ACLU to try to determine the scope of the problem. They had to individually review each application that fell within the guidelines to see if the teenager checked the box to register to vote.

And all of the state’s attorneys 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 error is not fair.

“This is a case about a fundamental constitutional right,” Chaney said in court Friday. “First-time voters will be unfairly excluded from historic elections.”