A sign with the words “Vote Here Today” posted outside a Camden polling place during the 2024 presidential election. (File photo by Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — A South Carolina law meant to prevent election fraud makes it harder for people with disabilities to vote, civil rights groups claimed in a federal lawsuit.
Under a 2022 law, anyone can vote early with no excuse necessary or request an absentee ballot to vote by mail. To prevent the possibility of fraud, legislators added a limit of five ballots that any one person could request or submit for someone else.
In nursing homes and residential care settings, where residents often rely on a single staff member to help them vote, that makes voting difficult, attorneys for the state American Civil Liberties Union argued in a lawsuit filed in federal court Friday.
Three nursing home residents sued alongside the state NAACP, contending the law violates the federal Voting Rights Act.
Robert Caldwell, a 74-year-old resident of a Chester nursing home, has relied on a single social worker, Barvette Gaither, to help him vote in years past. According to the lawsuit, Gaither is a popular choice for assistance at the nursing home, since she has a good rapport with residents and knows a lot about the voting process.
Before the law, she submitted between 10 and 25 ballots for residents each election. Since the law passed, she has had to choose five residents and hand the rest off to other staff members or the residents’ family members, according to the lawsuit.
The same is true for 60-year-old Jonathan Bell and 75-year-old Sherry Jenkins, who live at a nursing home in Union. Deborah Allen, who oversees activities for Union Post Acute nursing home, helped most of its 25 residents submit ballots because she knew the process and deadlines, the lawsuit claims.
After the 2022 changes to state law, Allen had to prioritize who to help and Bell was not among them, since he has immediate family members nearby. But Bell worries he can’t rely on his family to help him fill out the ballot correctly and get it submitted on time, according to the lawsuit.
“These laws target some of our state’s most vulnerable voters and make it harder — sometimes even impossible —to cast a ballot,” Allen Chaney, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina, said in a release. “Voters who need help voting deserve to receive that help from someone they trust, without worrying that the state might arrest the person they choose.”
Nursing homes could assign other staff members to help residents. But, according to the legal challenge, the Voting Rights Act guarantees voters help from the person of their choice, even if that person is the choice of more than five residents.
Voting rights advocates raised similar concerns when the law passed in 2022. Some members of the League of Women Voters have stepped in to help people who can no longer rely on nursing home staff to help them vote, said Lynn Teague, the state chapter’s vice president.
“People in nursing homes are very often dependent on staff for their assistance,” Teague said Monday.
The June 2022 primaries were the first election under the law, which was widely praised at its ceremonial signing by lawmakers and leaders of both parties.
Although voting rights activists knew that section of the law might cause problems, it took several years for the stories of people in nursing homes struggling to vote since its passage to reach people who could file a lawsuit on their behalf, Chaney said.
“The voters being harmed are pretty far from the limelight,” Chaney said.
The five-ballot limitation was a compromise.
The cap was meant to prevent people from collecting a massive number of ballots, which they could then tamper with or discard, skewing the results one way or another, said Rep. Brandon Newton, a Lancaster Republican who shepherded the bill through the House.
“That’s when you have the opportunity for shenanigans, when someone is handling someone else’s ballots,” Newton said.
State law already banned volunteers or employees for a candidate from collecting heaps of ballots, a practice often called ballot harvesting. Legislators still worried about the potential for fraud if a single person turned in a large number of ballots, Newton said.
Some lawmakers wanted to allow only immediate family members to return an absentee ballot. Others wanted no cap at all. They settled on five after considering likely family scenarios, Newton said.
People who care for their elderly parents, parents-in-law and a homebound spouse, for instance, might need to submit five ballots in addition to their own. Any more ballots than six total per election cycle gets fishy, Newton said.
“We did not want to inconvenience anyone, but there needs to be a reasonable limit,” Newton said.
Beyond capping the number of ballots an “authorized representative” can turn in, the law limits who can be assisted. Voters can be helped by people who aren’t immediate family members if they’re physically unable to go to a polling place. According to the law’s definition of “authorized representative,” assisted voters must be ill or have a physical disability that confines them to a long-term care facility, hospital or their own home.
According to the lawsuit, that can leave people with cognitive disabilities unable to vote. They might rely on people who aren’t immediate family members for day-to-day help, which could include completing the absentee ballot process, the lawsuit claims.
State law also requires anyone helping a voter be registered to vote in South Carolina as well, which can cause problems for people living in facilities bordering state lines, since staff members might travel from North Carolina or Georgia, according to the lawsuit.
The ACLU is asking a federal judge to instruct the state attorney general to immediately stop enforcing the law, then throw it out entirely, according to the filing.
A spokesperson for the State Election Commission, which is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment.
SC Daily Gazette reporter Adrian Ashford contributed to this report.
