South Carolina moves to cancel June primary to allow for GOP gerrymander

South Carolina Republicans took the first step Friday to cancel the state’s June primary election — to give more time to potentially pass a new gerrymandered congressional map  — as absentee voting is already underway. 

A South Carolina House subcommittee voted 3-2 along party lines to advance a bill that would move the state’s June 9 primary election to August 11, with the expectation that the legislature would redraw the state’s congressional map to dismantle its lone Democratic district, represented by longtime Rep. Jim Clyburn. 

The vote came after the committee heard hours of public testimony urging lawmakers to reject pressure to delay the state’s primaries and draw new congressional maps. In all, 23 South Carolina residents testified against redistricting and moving the state’s primaries. No one spoke in support of either measure. 

More than 6,000 absentee ballots have already been sent out to military and overseas voters for the June primary — more than 200 of those ballots have since been returned, according to the South Carolina Election Commission (SCEC). Should the legislature approve the measure to delay the state’s primary, those ballots will be disqualified. 

Conway Belangia, the executive director of the SCEC, said at Friday’s hearing that moving the primary to August “will be difficult… but it is possible.” 

The difficulty, he outlined, is the massive amount it will cost taxpayers to toss out the ballots that have already been printed and sent to voters: Approximately $2.5 million. 

“That’s being done not for the benefit of all the citizens of this state, but for the benefit of one party,” Rep. Justin Bamberg (D) noted. 

Delaying the primary election would be done to accommodate a redistricting process moving so fast that even some state Republicans want to slow down. 

Earlier this week, Republicans in the South Carolina House approved a sine die amendment allowing lawmakers to return after adjournment to take up congressional redistricting — joining a cluster of Southern states rushing to redraw maps after the Supreme Court gutted key Voting Rights Act protections that had long shielded Black voting power from racial gerrymandering. 

But the state Senate, who convened yesterday and were expected to vote on the sine die amendment, did not take up the measure. Instead, the Senate pushed the vote to next week after some senators said they wanted to see what the new congressional map would look like. 

The map, presented during Friday’s House judiciary subcommittee hearing, would carve up Clyburn’s district, which sits in the South and Eastern part of the state and includes much of the majority-Black areas around the cities Charleston and Columbia. Instead, Charleston would be divided up into two districts — districts 1 and 7, the latter of which stretches more than 100 miles from Charleston. And Richland County, which contains the state’s capital city of Columbia, would be chopped up into three different districts. 

Dozens of residents testified in opposition to the map and bill to move the state’s primaries during the public comment portion of Friday’s hearing, including former Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison.

Of the proposed map, Harrison said “Richland County looks like a political jigsaw puzzle.”

For hours, South Carolina residents, one after the other, stepped up to the podium to address the House subcommittee. 

James Starnes, the president of a neighborhood association in Clyburn’s district, called the new map a “DEI map.”

“I’m looking at a map that says we’re not going to worry about qualifications, but we’re going to make sure that everybody is a Republican,” Starnes said. “That’s DEI, as defined by the Republican Party… This is the DEI map in my estimation.”

Chris Hemsall, a retired army colonel who also lives in Clyburn’s district, said he was “probably the most conservative person in this room,” and spoke out in opposition to the GOP’s gerrymandering efforts. 

“Who thinks gerrymandering is good for democracy?” he asked the lawmakers. “Who thinks gerrymandering makes for a more perfect union? Who thinks gerrymandering establishes justice? Nobody. We all know gerrymandering is wrong, so why are we doing it?”