COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles says they've worked with the State Election Commission to identify the voters that are still without a finalized registration, after one 17-year-old discovered a registration error that the American Civil Liberties Union says goes back two decades.
Voters who are 17 but will turn 18 by the time of the next election are eligible to complete their voter registration before they turn 18, but due to an error at the DMV, they haven't been allowed to for the past 22 years, according to the lawsuit.
The issue has gotten the state's DMV and Election Commission in a lawsuit with the ACLU, who is asking the judge to order an injunction to the Election Commission to register these voters. The deadline to register to vote was over a week ago, after the Election Commission was ordered by a judge in a different lawsuit to extend following the impacts of Hurricane Helene.
It's also led to some political pushback, according to a spokesperson for the ACLU of SC, who says Senate President Thomas Alexander, R-Oconee, and the SCGOP have both moved to block the registration from being granted in court. News 19 reached out to both Sen. Alexander and a spokesperson for the SCGOP, and hasn't heard back yet.
State and federal law requires the DMV provide eligible voters with the opportunity to register any time they g to get a license—which for many people is the age of 17. Noah Counts went to get his license in February, and says he wanted to make sure he was registered.
"I really wanted to be able to cast my ballot, because, you know, it was my first presidential election I was going to be voting in, and I thought that it was really important to fulfill my civic duty," said Counts.
When you go to get a license—Step 5 on the application asks you if you’d like to register to vote, which is supposed to trigger a second confirmation form on the DMV's card readers that lets an applicant sign to attest they meet the qualifications to register, according to the lawsuit. But for the voters in this age range—they were never prompted with the second form—so their request would never make it to the state Election Commission.
Counts checked the form to register and says he verbally confirmed with the clerk at the DMV that he was registered, but in September when he went to double check his registration with his local precinct, they had no record of him. He was able to manually register online before the deadline, but many weren't so lucky.
"I could just imagine myself showing up to poll day and being told that I couldn't vote, and so I'd essentially have been denied the right to vote."
His complaint made it to the state ACLU last week, who submitted an inquiry to the SCDMV. With the DMV's help, they found more than 17 thousand voters in that age range who were not presented with the final form to register, and none of their information had been given to the SCEC.
"What we had thought was an isolated incident turned out to be a widespread issue that raises really serious concerns about democracy and about voting rights in our state," said Bowers.
They filed a lawsuit yesterday asking the court to order the registrations. But he says they've faced pushback from Republican lawmakers and party officials.
"This is not a partisan issue. We're not here defending the rights of only Democrats or only Republicans, these are voters, and they represent the full geographic scope and the diversity and the political spectrum of our state, and to intervene to block those young voters from the polls is just inherently anti democratic," said Bowers.
While the DMV has identified the affected potential new voters, no court order has been made to issue registrations to those individuals. The SCEC was not able to extend the voter registration deadline for Helene's impacts without a court order, but it's unclear if that is the same case in this scenario. The SCEC declined to comment.