If an Ohio voter misses two federal elections, that voter will get a series of letters from the Secretary of State. If they fail to return one confirming they still live at that address, they are removed from the list of registered voters.

In South Carolina, voters register for life. When a voter dies, the State Bureau of Vital Statistics alerts the SEC, and the person’s name is removed from the list.

The only other ways to be removed is to write the State Election Commission and request that your name be removed, or register to vote in another state, in which case that state may let the SEC know to remove you.

So — other than asking to be removed or registering in another state, South Carolinians remain registered to vote until they die.

The process is this: if you don’t vote in two presidential elections, the SEC mails a notice to your residence advising you to return the letter to remain on the roll of active voters. If you don’t respond, your name gets dropped from the precinct poll books and your name goes on the list of inactive voters kept by the county and state election office. If you show up at your old precinct and they tell you that you aren’t on the list, you tell the poll manager to contact their county office and check the inactive list. You will then be allowed to vote a regular ballot. The precinct poll books have long been cleaned up in this manner to save time signing people in and reduce the cost of printing.

The SC Progressive Network has been monitoring SC elections since 2004, when ours was the first state to buy the touch-screen voting machines that are now aging but we’re still using. We opposed the purchase of the machines then, for the same reasons people are complaining now. We have been working with the bipartisan Joint Legislative Committee on Voting Systems, and are confident that our next system will produce a voter-verified paper ballot. The goal now is to get out from under the devices that rely on secret computer codes and move to a low-tech, open-source, non-proprietary, publicly owned system.

Over the years, the Network has learned the state’s election laws, written some new ones, and beaten some in court. We’ve also gained an appreciation of the SEC’s independence from political bias and the commitment of county directors to running fair elections. The type voter purging that’s making news in battleground states where partisan officials run elections isn’t happening in South Carolina. The problem here is that our state legislature has gerrymandered the political game board to the degree that 77 percent of the voters only find one name on their general election ballot to represent them in the State House. When there is only one candidate, it hardly matters who gets to vote. (See how South Carolina’s democracy ranks HERE).