South Carolina redistricting: Governor forces lawmakers back to session to eliminate lone majority-Black district
Immediately after the South Carolina legislature ended their legislative session Thursday, Gov. Henry McMaster (R) called lawmakers back to redraw the state’s congressional map and eliminate its lone majority-Black district.
It wasn’t a surprise: McMaster signaled Wednesday that he would be calling a special session for redistricting. But the move was a reversal from McMaster’s previous stance at the beginning of the month, when his office specifically said that he wouldn’t call a special redistricting session, amid pressure from President Donald Trump.
McMaster’s move also comes after the state Senate voted earlier this week against reconvening for a special session to take up redistricting. The resolution — which allows the legislature to come back after their regular session ends to finish matters — needed a two-thirds vote in both the Senate and House to pass; it passed the House but failed in a 29-17 vote in the Senate.
The rush for South Carolina to draw a new congressional map also comes at a rather precarious time for voters: absentee voting for the state’s June 9 primary election is already underway, and early voting kicks off in less than two weeks. More than 9,000 absentee ballots have already been sent out to military and overseas voters; 549 of those ballots have been returned.
What to do about the June 9 primary election — and the ballots that have already been cast — is one of the numerous problems that lawmakers will have to figure out when they reconvene Friday for the start of the redistricting debate.
One such proposal that the state House is considering is to decouple the congressional primary election from all of the other downballot races on June 9, and push the congressional primary back to August, to give the legislature more time to pass their gerrymander.
During a House subcommittee last week, Democratic lawmakers warned that such a plan would create chaos and confusion among voters. And it would cost the state about $2.5 million, according to testimony by Conway Belangia, the executive director of the South Carolina Election Commission.
Sen. Chip Campsen (R) said before Tuesday’s vote in the Senate that the proposed timeline for redistricting makes it “almost impossible for us to pull this off.”
Several local elected officials also criticized the legislature’s rushed redistricting effort.
“Redrawing congressional maps on a compressed timeline is not the deliberate, principled process South Carolinians deserve,” Charleston Mayor William Cogswell (R) and Mount Pleasant Mayor Will Haynie (R) wrote in a joint statement. “We would encourage members of the General Assembly to slow down, ask hard questions, and let principle guide them over politics.
Campsen also criticized the new map, which was introduced in the state House last week. The map was reportedly drawn by the GOP’s go-to mapmaker, Adam Kincaid, and endorsed by the Trump White House.
“This is a map that’s had no input from South Carolina citizens,” Campsen said. “No input from the House of Representatives, no input from the South Carolina Senate. It was just handed down from above. It was drawn by people with no concept of the interests of the people of this state.”
Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey (R), who’s been a vocal opponent of the redistricting effort, also warned his fellow lawmakers Tuesday that redrawing the state’s map could end up backfiring by making more districts competitive for Democrats.
“This is going to motivate Black [voter] turnout,” Massey said. “And there will be repercussions for that. There will be Republican losses because of this.”
