A man participates in exit polling after voting in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary at Dreher High School on Feb. 24, 2024 in Columbia, South Carolina. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
COLUMBIA — A civil liberties organization is suing to add potentially thousands of young South Carolina residents to the voter roll two weeks before the election.
The state American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Tuesday alleging that the state Department of Motor Vehicles’ system made it impossible for some 17,000 eligible teenagers to register to vote while obtaining a driver’s license or other identification. The lawsuit also names the State Election Commission.
Voter registration has been closed for a week already.
But Paul Bowers, an ACLU spokesperson, said the organization did not hear about the issue until Oct. 12, when a social media post by state Rep. Spencer Wetmore, D-Folly Beach, brought it to the group’s attention.
The 17-year-old son of a friend, Wetmore said, thought he’d registered to vote while applying for a driver’s license at the DMV. He turns 18 on Nov. 1.
When the family went online to check his registration, it didn’t exist. So, Wetmore took to social media ahead of the voter registration deadline to warn other teens they may need to re-register too.
“We were trying to look into what had happened in this one case with this one potential voter,” Bowers told the SC Daily Gazette. “Through that process, (the legal team) found out that this problem was more widespread than we initially thought.”
State law allows teenagers who will turn 18 by Election Day to register to vote up to 13 months in advance.
Normally citizens can check a box saying “yes, I wish to register to vote” at the DMV and be added to the voter roll with almost no additional steps.
But the state DMV system was programmed to ignore requests from teens who were not already 18 when they attempted to register, even if they would turn 18 by Election Day, according to the lawsuit. The system did not necessarily notify these teenagers that their attempt to register was unsuccessful, according to the lawsuit.
Over the past week, the ACLU worked with the SCDMV to identify 17,564 people who fell into this category over the last 13 months. The ACLU then checked with the State Election Commission and that 6,240 of these teenagers had registered successfully to vote some other way, leaving over 10,000 potentially unregistered.
“I had no idea it was going to snowball into this,” Wetmore told the SC Daily Gazette. “I just didn’t have any concept it would be so many kids.”
She’s grateful to the ACLU for taking it up, saying “it shouldn’t have come to that, but here we are.”
While the ACLU got a total count of people who could have been potentially impacted, figuring out how many teenagers actually checked the box saying they wanted to register to vote will take someone physically reviewing all the forms, Bowers said. There is no electronic database of who did and did not check the box.
“The South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles is aware of the concerns raised in the ACLU lawsuit,” wrote Mike Fitts, a DMV spokesman, in a statement to the Gazette. “The agency is working with the State Election Commission on possible ways to remedy the issue.”
Fitts also encouraged voters to verify their information through the Election Commission website.
The lawsuit, filed in Richland County, includes a request for an emergency order for the DMV to identify any 17-year-olds who checked the box to register to vote but were not processed, and add them to the voter roll.
“Through all of this, the folks at the DMV, state Election Commission have been transparent, helpful. It seems like they are earnestly trying to make this right,” Bowers said. “No doubt it’s a logistical and technical issue that is coming up here, but we’re hopeful that because the two state agencies have been cooperative and open that we’ll be able to restore rights for as many people as possible as quickly as possible.”
Although the immediate request is focused on this general election, the issue has been ongoing for at least 22 years, according to the ACLU. The state DMV is required to assist customers with registering to vote under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, a federal law.
The Election Commission does not comment on ongoing legal matters, a spokesperson said.
No court hearings had been scheduled as of Tuesday evening.
Registration for the Nov. 5 election was initially scheduled to end on Oct. 4 for in-person registration, but in the wake of Tropical Storm Helene the state Democratic Party successfully asked a court to extend the deadline to Oct. 14.
The extension was ordered by Circuit Court Judge Daniel Coble, and Bowers said Coble will also review this case from the ACLU.
According to the state Election Commission, there is a process in place for people who think they registered at the DMV but aren’t on the voter list when they show up at the polls. But it’s time-consuming for everyone involved. The intended voter could wait while a county election official calls the state Election Commission, which would call the DMV to confirm the person took the correct steps to register, but the information didn’t transfer for whatever reason. If everything checks out, the person could then vote normally.