SC judge rules against ACLU in voter registration lawsuit
As legal battles over voter registration continue to rear their heads across the country, a judge in South Carolina has dealt a blow to a well-known liberal advocacy group.
According to the Post and Courier, a judge in the state's capital city of Columbia rejected a a preliminary injunction request in a case initiated by the Trump-unfriendly ACLU against the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) which claimed that thousands of nearly 18-year-olds were wrongly denied access to voter registration.
ACLU files suit
As NBC affiliate station WCNC explained, the ACLU filed suit arguing that the South Carolina DMV and the South Carolina Election Commission are at fault for unlawfully failing to facilitate voter registrations for 17-year-old residents who would reach their 18th birthday by Election Day.
According to the ACLU, roughly 17,000 South Carolinians falling into that age category were improperly denied the opportunity to register to vote over the past year, a problem the group says has persisted for decades.
Under federal election rules, state motor vehicle departments are mandated to offer residents the chance to register to vote when applying for a new or renewed state ID or driver's license, and though it is claimed that the DMV in this case did just that with regard to the 17-year-olds in question, the information submitted was not forwarded to the state Election Commission and it was not made clear that follow-up would be needed to complete the process.
At the outset of the lawsuit, the ACLU's South Carolina legal director, Allen Chaney, declared, “If thousands of young, first-time voters are only not able to vote because of an error at the DMV, that would be a profound miscarriage of justice.”
Expressing what he said was the urgency of getting the matter before a judge, Chaney added, “The ball is really in the court of the election commission and the courts now to determine how to get those impacted voters registered and eligible to cast ballots on election day.”
Judge says no
However, much to the dismay of the plaintiffs in the case Circuit Judge Daniel Coble last week rejected the claim that the DMV acted to unlawfully deny teenagers the ability to register to vote.
Lawyers for the DMV argued that state statute forbids the agency from assisting minors with voter registration, noting that those under 18 can register only through the “county board of voter registration and elections.
They also contended that a minor's supposed right to register to vote is not something guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, and therefore no violation of law could have occurred.
Coble agreed with the defendants, declaring that the ACLU did not provide sufficient evidence of any sort of disenfranchisement, such as affidavits from allegedly impacted teens and rejecting the group's request for an preliminary injunction.
The judge explained that in his estimation, there was “no effectual relief that this Court could grant, and even if attempted to, he relief sought would create disorder in the voting system,” ahead of Election Day, though he did not rule on a request for a permanent injunction, signaling that changes desired by the ACLU in the registration process for teens could eventually come to pass.
