3 days Ago
In case you're disappointed that the nation isn't at blows again over trumped-up claims of stolen elections, I've got one of those very rare stories of honest-to-goodness stolen elections and voter disenfranchisement to share with you, from right here in South Carolina. And as The Post and Courier’s Nicole Ziege reports, this election heist has a happy ending . Well, more happy than not.
On Election Day, S.C. Circuit Judge William Seals ordered Carla Taylor to be seated immediately on the Atlantic Beach Town Council, an office to which she was duly elected on Nov.
7 — 2023. A year after being duly elected, this SC official is finally taking office The voters will never get back those 363 days, give or take, they lost when their chosen candidate was barred from serving on the Town Council by increasingly creative — and pretty much always clearly illegal — schemes to keep her off. But at least Ms.
Taylor will get to serve the final three years of her four-year term — thanks to the court’s willingness to intervene. Cindi Ross Scoppe Until a year ago, this tiny coastal town, population 355 or so, was known mainly for its raucous annual biker weekend. How we got to this point is a long and convoluted tale that ultimately boils down to members of the Town Council and its hand-picked municipal election commission refusing to accept the will of the voters.
Along the way, it indicts the Legislature, which created the legal framework that allowed this to happen — and refused to do anything to fix it during the entire 2024 legislative session. Ms. Taylor’s election might have been all that was needed to replace a lawless Atlantic Beach regime: WPDE reports that after the interim town manager canceled a meeting scheduled for Wednesday, Ms.
Taylor and two other council members who now constitute a majority met outdoors and fired him and the town attorney who had helped keep her out of office. But it's up to the Legislature to ensure that neither this nor any other municipality with its own election commission is able to similarly disenfranchise voters again — at least not for this long. It’s a bit difficult to keep up with all the moving pieces in this you-can’t-make-this-up drama, but here's a brief recap of what has happened since Nov.
7, 2023: When the council majority’s chosen candidate for mayor appeared to have lost but before its election commission could certify the results, the Town Council held a hastily called special meeting and abolished the commission, in violation of state law. Editorial: Atlantic Beach election coup demands state action The council eventually acknowledged that it had no power to abolish the commission, but it replaced the chairman for what might or might not have been legitimate reasons — after which the commission refused for months to do its job of certifying the election. In April, it threw out 13 votes in the mayor’s race, decided that neither of the two leading candidates for mayor had a majority, announced that there would have to be a do-over election for mayor and certified Ms.
Taylor’s election. But the council refused to let Ms. Taylor take office, and the election commission allowed fourth-place finisher Shaun Swinson to appeal the election results, triggering a crazy S.
C. law that says the incumbent remains in office if anyone challenges an election result. (At the risk of getting too deep into the weeds, the incumbent that maneuver allowed to stay in office, Josephine Isom, was the council’s preferred candidate for mayor.
) Editorial: How long will SC Legislature let Atlantic Beach keep disenfranchising voters? The commission also declared it couldn’t hear the appeal of Ms. Taylor’s win until after an outstanding matter was settled on the mayor’s race. It gets worse: The appeal of Ms.
Taylor’s victory, as Judge Seal noted, came 147 days after the 48-hour deadline — and from a convicted felon who wasn’t even legally allowed to run for office. All this convinced the judge not only to reject the election commission’s decisions but to declare himself “extremely concerned by the Municipal Election Commission’s actions to delay the resolution of this Town Council race.” Editorial: Maybe we do need a SLED probe of Atlantic Beach, but not the one officials want “It appears to this Court that the Municipal Election Commission’s repeated delays were frivolous and intentional to thwart the will of the people who elected Appellant Taylor to serve on Town Council,” he wrote.
“If election commissions across our country handled election protests in this manner, the very backbone of our democracy would be broken and in disarray. This matter is extremely important to democracy in our state and country.” So, what to do about all this? The first thing the Legislature needs to do is repeal the law that requires city and town council members to remain in office after an election if anyone challenges the results of the election.
That gives losing incumbents every incentive to file frivolous challenges to drag things out, and in more complicated cases like this one, it incentivizes a majority coalition to back frivolous challenges to an open seat in order to keep all of its coalition in office. Here I'll remind you that the Legislature almost fixed this problem, but the legislation got thwarted in the final minutes of the session by — you guessed it — the so-called House Freedom Caucus . Editorial: How SC Freedom Caucus is helping keep a holdover in office in Atlantic Beach Second, as much as I love subsidiarity , I'm not convinced that municipalities should be allowed to run their own election commissions.
But if the Legislature insists on allowing this, it needs to add some safeguards by authorizing either the county or state election commission to overrule those panels' decisions — at least when, as in this case, they clearly violated state law. Third, the fourth-place finisher in Ms. Taylor's race said he filed his appeal within 48 hours of the election commission tossing out 13 votes in the mayor’s race.
It’s worth considering whether the 48-hour appeal should be extended in cases such as this, when votes are discarded well past the deadline as a result of a different appeal. There might be good reasons to leave the law like it is, but it’s certainly worth exploring. After the Legislature fixes those problems we know need fixing.
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