Everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask about the citizens campaign to end partisan gerrymandering in South Carolina.
SC Progressive Network Director Brett Bursey breaks it down.
More about the campaign and how to volunteer at FairMapsSC.com.
Fair Maps advocates are invited to trainings on June 16 and 17 on Zoom to learn how to advance our Richland County petition drive to empower citizens to draw district lines.
For volunteers who are already trained on our Fair Maps campaign to end gerrymandering, we are offering a one-hour Zoom session on virtual phone banking (VPB) to advance our legally binding petition drive in Richland County. You do not have to reside in that county to participate.
Register for the June 16, 7pm Zoom training by clicking HERE. Please read the Pandemic Adjusted Plan beforehand. After registering, you will receive the tools you need for the training and to start calling Network members and allies for our pandemic-adjusted campaign.
We will use this initial effort to call Network supporters to adjust methodology and messaging before widening our outreach to the scores of thousands of fellow voters in South Carolina we know agree with us. This campaign will run through Labor Day.
For newcomers and anyone wanting a refresher course on the Fair Maps SC campaign, register for the June 17, 7pm Zoom training by clicking HERE. Please review the materials in the organizers’ toolkit at FairMapsSC.com beforehand. Participants will get their VPB number and phone bank training on June 18.
This initial effort is focused on getting Richland County Council to pass our Fair Maps resolution. You can help from wherever you live — without ever leaving your home.
If you have questions about the trainings or problems logging on, call 803-808-3384 or email FairMapsSC.com.
Before heading out to vote in Tuesday’s primary, make sure you:
• Check your status at scvotes.org.
• Check this list to see whether your precinct has been moved. Please note that this list will change several times before the polls close. We will try to keep it current as we get data.
• Keep the voting hotline number handy in case you encounter or witness problems at the polls. Call 866-OUR-VOTE to report any problems. The nonpartisan coalition of lawyers and election protection advocates managing the hotline can offer help in real time, and the reports provide the information needed to make the system more efficient in November.
• Print out this sign, and ask your poll worker whether you may post it for voters. If they have questions or concerns, have them call our office at 803-808-3384.
Headed to the polls? Keep this number handy.
Election Protection, the nation’s largest nonpartisan voter protection coalition, is ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to vote in South Carolina. Its 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline is an important service for those heading out to vote.
“This will be the 12th year that this free, nonpartisan service has helped South Carolina voters with problems at the polls,” said SC Progressive Network Education Fund Director Brett Bursey. “Calls to the hotline provide the only real-time, statewide audit of our election system, which helps us identify and address systemic problems.”
Voters are urged to report problems that they experience or witness, so officials can see patterns to improve upon.
Changes have been made to adjust to Covid-19. Many regular polling places will not be available. Voters should check the hotline or go to scvotes.org, to see open sites. Or they can call the local County Board of election to confirm polling locations.
Voters are still getting used to the new voting machines that produce a paper ballot. After voting, you should verify that your ballot was marked correctly before inserting it into the scanner. If the ballot is incorrect, you should turn it in to a poll worker and vote again.
“Voters must be aware that the state’s photo ID requirements will be enforced for voting in the 2020 presidential preference primary,” said Susan Dunn, attorney for the ACLU of South Carolina. All voters are required to bring either a valid driver’s license, DMV-issued ID card, or their photo-voter registration card with them to the polls on Election Day.
Dunn notes that registered voters with a “reasonable impediment” that hindered the ability to obtain a photo ID will be allowed to vote a provisional ballot, and the votes will be counted without the voter having to appear to defend their ballot at the county certification hearing. “We recommend voters without one of the accepted IDs to trade their old paper registration card at their county elections office for one with a photo on it,” Dunn said. If you do not have a photo ID, you should bring your voter registration card to the poll.
By calling 1-866-OUR-VOTE, voters can confirm their registration status, find their polling location, and ask about required identification at the polls. Voters are encouraged to report any problems.
Call 1-888-Ve-Y-Vota (1-888-83-9-8682) — or veyvota.org for help in Spanish.
Verify your registration status to ensure that you can vote.
· Confirm your polling location, even if it has been in the same place for years.
· Bring required ID and know your rights regarding providing identification.
· Prepare your registered friends and neighbors, and bring them to the polls!
· If your requested absentee ballot does not arrive in the mail, call your county election Board on Monday, June 8.
Gov. Henry McMaster’s accelerateSC task force released its final report today, a day after Covid-19 deaths peaked in South Carolina. The rush to reopen businesses here concerns leaders of organizations advocating for the rights of workers, whose voices were missing from the task force. They worry that employees are being sacrificed for the economy that they sustain.
SC AFL-CIO President Charles Brave Jr. said none of the $1.9 billion in federal Covid-19 relief funds will be directed to provide protective equipment for those being forced back to work, nor is there a recommendation that employers be required to follow CDC guidelines on protective measures. Brave’s office sent letters to the governor, the House Speaker, and the Senate Minority Leader offering to serve as the voice for workers on the task force. “I never heard back from any of them,” he said.
The SC AFL-CIO represents the interests of union and nonunion workers in South Carolina. Brave wants to be sure that their health is a primary consideration in the drive to reopen South Carolina businesses. “If getting South Carolina back to work is as essential as the governor claims, there must be funds to protect workers,” he said, noting that nobody on the task force risks being fired for refusing to put themselves or their families at risk.
State government has historically placed profit over public health, said Brett Bursey, director of the SC Progressive Network. “Rather than making worker safety a priority, the legislature is rushing to pass a bill to protect corporations from any liability resulting from Covid-related deaths of their workers.”
Members of the task force representing corporate interests supported legislation to prohibit local governments from establishing sick leave benefits for workers. In 2017, Gov. McMaster signed a bill adding the prohibition of local sick leave ordinances to an earlier law prohibiting a higher minimum wage.
“In 2014, restaurant workers testified in legislative hearings that employees were being fired for not coming to work sick,” Bursey said. “The bill we supported (S-906) called for 40 hours of earned paid sick leave for large companies, and earned unpaid sick leave for small ones.”
Efforts to pass even modest laws to prevent sick workers from being fired for not going to work never have made it out of legislative subcommittee.
SC NAACP President Brenda Murphy has been helping NAACP units around the state cut through the confusion and misinformation surrounding the pandemic. “Disproportionately, we’re already seeing injustices that must be addressed before they worsen and cause further damage within the African American communities,” she said. “Our state and local governments must ensure necessary policies, practices, and testing of all citizens, and ensuring proper Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for health professionals and workers at risk. We must see that needed information, training, resources, and care are available equitably, and reach people in all communities.”
According to a May 20 CDC report, a majority of South Carolina’s Covid-19 deaths are in the state’s minority-black population. “More of us are dying because more of us have been denied adequate health care,” Murphy said. “This pandemic provides evidence that our communities are still separate and unequal.”
While it defies logic, local minimum wage, sick leave, and any employee benefits are banned by law in SC (SC Code of Law: Sect. 41-1-25). Bursey said, “If you trust our state government to protect workers’ health, safety, or wages, then you aren’t paying attention.” If you had any doubt, just look at the task force, where the strongest lobbies against any employee benefits are represented, while workers are not.
On the day he was to be married, we mourned the loss of our friend Tim Liszewski and celebrated the love he shared with his fiancee, Maris Burton. More than 100 of his friends and family gathered online to share stories, read poems, play music, and toast a life well lived.
Tim died unexpectedly on March 28 at the Columbia home he shared with Maris. He had recently returned from an Indivisible conference in Wisconsin.
On Sunday, Tim was listed on the front page of the New York Times along with 999 others, their names representing just 1% of Americans dead since the pandemic hit. “Toward the end of May in the year 2020,” the paper reported, ” the number of people in the United States who have died from the coronavirus neared 100,000 — almost all of them within a three-month span.”
South Carolina numbers are hard to trust, as the state has been opaque about testing and contact tracing, and has dragged its feet in setting clear public protocols. In fact, last month the Palmetto State earned an “F” for its handling of the pandemic thus far.
A few Network members put together a video for Tim’s homegoing, a movement tune we have sung for years at meetings and conferences. It is a June Jordan poem set to music. You can see our interpretation of it here.
It was a bittersweet afternoon remembering Tim and holding Maris in a virtual group hug. We will miss him.
The spring session of the Modjeska Simkins School has not gone as planned. Turns out, the student orientation on March 15 was the first and last time the group would meet in person. The extent of the threat posed by the coronavirus in South Carolina was just becoming clear.
The crisis forced our classes online. While the format is not ideal, it does have its benefits, one being that classes are recorded so students can see material they missed or want to revisit. We are offering access to the course readings and class recordings as a gift to our friends and allies, hoping they may educate and inspire in these tough times.
The school’s faculty co-ordinator, Dr. Robert Greene, a professor at Claflin University, said, “The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many people around the world to take refuge in their homes. The hope of ‘flattening the curve,’ the attempt to get the virus to a manageable level for health care systems around the world, is now underway. With so many people at home, numerous universities and libraries across the world have opened their online archives to everyone who is hungry for knowledge.
“In that same vein, the SC Progressive Network’s Modjeska Simkins School is also opening its virtual doors. Our study guides and filmed lectures offer a rich vein of information about South Carolina’s long history of oppression and hope. Despite the darkness of the pandemic dimming the dreams of many, we hope that you will find our resources valuable to preparing to build a better world after the pandemic has run its course. After all, Modjeska Simkins herself believed both in knowing one’s history, and in making public health among disadvantaged communities an important priority.”
It has not been the experience students signed up for, but they have adjusted without complaint to meeting on Zoom. In years past, students often stayed after class to talk with the professors and classmates. To make up for that lack of personal interaction, the school added extra sessions for students to ask questions, offer suggestions, and comment on the course so far.
Jacob Twitty said, “I have thoroughly enjoyed it and have learned so much. A lot of the history didn’t come as a surprise — the details — but the Reconstruction era just fascinates me. The more I learn about that, the more I wonder how South Carolina as a state would be different if we had continued in that regard. It’s amazing to see how we far we have gone the other way in spite of the rich history that we have here.”
Lewis Pitts, a reformed NC lawyer who has been a guest speaker at the school since its first session in 2015, is able to attend the entire program this time because he can join on Zoom. “What struck me about the Reconstruction period is that when we actually expanded democracy to include more people, particularly African-American freed slaves, we had a much more progressive agenda. Public education, there are many things white Americans should be thanking that period for. The more we pull the blanket of democracy down to cover all the feet in the bed, the more warmth and the more progress is shown for all of our society.”
“I am really enjoying the course,” Dr. Bernie Gallman said in an email. The scholar of African roots and the pre-colonial advanced culture added, “The course syllabus for all the classes are outstanding.”
The history portion of the session ended on May 18. The remaining classes will be about political theory, and conclude with student presentations of projects they will commit to upon graduation.
• Click here for class schedule and links to course material.
• Click here to access class recordings, updated each week.
The Modjeska Simkins School is a project of the SC Progressive Network. The next session is tentatively scheduled for this fall.
The pandemic has exposed the moral bankruptcy of basing critical public services such as health care and education on profit. Two recent examples:
South Carolina remains one of the few states to refuse using our federal taxes to provide health care to the quarter-million poor people living here who are now the most likely vector for spreading Covid-19. The Network led the fight to expand Medicaid, but our governors continue to choose free enterprise over public welfare.
South Carolina is the only state whose taxpayers own the entire educational broadcast system. The state’s control of all 63 broadcast licenses and 700 towers began in 1958, when the legislature started ETV and was considering closing public schools to keep them all-white. There were no black legislators then in SC, or in Mississippi, where their Jim Crow legislature owns 75% of the licenses. In other states, communities and universities own the majority of licenses.
In 2009, when the nation’s broadcast spectrum went digital, the Network was the only voice at the table fighting to use the “excess spectrum” of our educational broadband system to provide a statewide system of free internet, at least for the 600,000 school children who qualified for free lunch.
Now, more than a decade later, the schools are finally closed, and students are told to watch their lessons on television. They could be taking interactive classes at home on their phones or laptops, but the legislature continued to worship free enterprise by leasing out ETV’s excess broadband to telcom corporations for a fraction of its value. Sen. Harvey Peeler argued that giving citizens something for free would be “socialism.” Free enterprise won again.
President Trump’s slavish obeisance to profit over people is killing those he was sworn to protect. Let us not let them die in vain. For the past 25 years, the SC Progressive Network has been in laying the groundwork for a movement to reconstruct democracy. Our Missing Voter Project has been reaching out to the 75% of young South Carolinians who don’t believe that voting will do any good. We agree with them, and tell them we can’t rely on the system that cheapens life to reorder its priorities and we need a movement outside the system to change it.
Our nonpartisan voter education and registration efforts focus on policies rather than candidates or parties. Our 2020 MVP is using high-tech tools to identify and mobilize the fewer than 10 percent of South Carolinians under 28 years old who have never voted in a general election.
We were heartbroken to learn that our friend and colleague Tim Liszewski died at his home in Columbia on March 28 of coronavirus, which he likely contracted at an Indivisible conference in Wisconsin. He was 60 years old, and leaves behind two children, Aaron and Rebecca Liszewski.
Tim was to be married in May to his longtime partner, Maris Burton. Instead, she is planning his memorial, which will be held when it is safe to gather. Meanwhile, Maris herself is recovering at the home she shares with her sister, Barb.
After feeling sick for a week and suspecting that it might be coronovirus, Tim was tested on March 21. He was told they would get results in 2-5 days, but it wasn’t until four days after his death that the coroner’s office confirmed that he had tested positive. Maris is frustrated that they did not know sooner so they could warn others with whom they’d been in contact.
Their story lays bare the state’s slow response to the pandemic and lack of transparency in testing and tracking of Covid-19 cases in South Carolina. The governor has yet to issue a stay-at-home order, making ours one of just 12 states without one. Tim, who worked as one of the Network’s ACA Navigators in 2013-2014, would be angered by the way the pandemic is playing out here and in other states that refused to expand Medicaid, as detailed in this story.
We got to know Tim when he moved to Columbia in 2005 from his native Cleveland, Ohio, to serve as director for the Carolina Peace Resource Center, a longtime Network member. He would go on to work for various political campaigns, in South Carolina and out of state, but stayed in touch. The last time we saw him was at our Fair Maps event at the State House on the first day of session to press lawmakers to end gerrymandering in South Carolina.
Tim was mild mannered and big hearted. He lived his values. Alongside Maris, he helped feed homeless people in Columbia through Food Not Bombs, and volunteered regularly at Nickelodeon Theater. In a story in The State about his work helping people access health care, Tim said, “This is not a job, it’s a lifestyle.”
Tim was one of 19 Occupy Columbia protesters arrested in November 2010 after refusing to bow to Gov. Nikki Haley’s order to evacuate the State House grounds. Charges were later dropped, and Occupiers were each awarded a $10,000 settlement for violation of their First Amendment rights.
At a hearing during the Occupy Columbia saga, which played out for months, Tim spoke on behalf of those arrested. “There are lobbyists and people with money who are occupying inside the State House. This was our symbolic representation of us taking back the State House grounds for all of the citizens, not just the citizens with influence and with money.”
Tim graduated from the Modjeska Simkins School in 2017. In a blog post about the session he said, “Knowing there are people younger than I am who are actually taking up the cause gives me hope and makes me less angry. Let’s make some change that lasts.”
Network Cochair Kyle Criminger had this to say about our colleague. “A creative, civilly disobedient Occupier of Columbia, a first-rate ‘commandant’ (his word) of the Progressive Network’s efforts with the ACA Health Insurance Marketplace, and a senior regional leader of the Indivisible Project, Tim was an astute community organizer, laser-sharp with his words and with purposeful quips. He always studied and adapted in order to be effective where his feet hit the ground beside his fellow progressives. The social justice movement will miss him.”
The Network sends our collective love to Maris, and to her and Tim’s families.
Maris shared this message: Tim’s family, my sister Barb and myself are overwhelmed at the amazing outpouring of love, respect and kindness you are sharing about Tim (and me). He would be embarrassed at the fuss and then say, “is it true? Do they really mean that?” Yes Tim, you are loved by me and so many more. So thank you all for your words and your “Service in Action” that Tim practiced daily. Our lawn looks amazing, we are being fed, groceries supplied, laundry done! and a continuing offer for other services we will be needing. We feel the love. I am working on getting rid of my virus symptom of “the cough and fatigue” and being well enough to tackle household tasks. Be kind, do good deeds, wash hands and take this seriously. It kills.
See special edition of The Gamecock recounting what happened after Bursey’s arrest and revelation that his partner in the incident, Jack Weatherford, was an undercover cop.