Suspend judgment on dead voters claims

For two weeks, supporters of our state’s new voter identification law crowed that they had been vindicated by the announcement by Gov. Nikki Haley’s Department of Motor Vehicles director that nearly 1,000 dead people had cast ballots. It was an extraordinary, and deeply disturbing, claim that finally seemed to provide the evidence supporters had never bothered to present that we need such a law.

Or not.

It turns out that at least some of those people weren’t really dead, and some of them didn’t vote. We don’t know how many, because Kevin Shwedo hadn’t provided Election Commission Director Marci Andino with his list by the time she took her turn before a House subcommittee last week. But she said that she had found no indications of fraud among the 20 names she received from the attorney general’s office, which appropriately ordered an investigation based on Mr. Shwedo’s claim. What she found instead were stray marks on voter lists that made it look like people voted when they didn’t, people who cast absentee ballots early and then died before Election Day, a Sr. listed as voting when in fact it was a Jr.

Does this mean there was no fraud? Unfortunately not, and Ms. Andino and SLED need to continue their reviews, because with so many DMV records suggesting people died before ballots were cast in their names, it seems quite possible that there’s at least a little fire behind all that smoke.

What it means is that we shouldn’t be so quick to accept those claims that confirm our preconceived notions – particularly when there are so many red flags.

Cynics (and Democrats) say Mr. Shwedo’s headline-grabbing claim was just a bit too convenient, coming just a day after his boss announced plans to fight the U.S. Justice Department over its refusal to let the law take effect requiring voters to present a S.C. driver’s license or federal identification in order to cast a ballot. It also was just the latest back and forth between the rookie DMV chief and the veteran election director. In December, Mr. Shwedo had said that Ms. Andino ignored his warnings that the number of voters who don’t have a driver’s license was inflated; she fired back that he had taken liberties in matching nearly identical names on the voting and driver’s license lists.

His dead-voters claim was a rebuttal to her rebuttal, and it was as short on details as it was long on drama. Were the votes cast in person, which would support the need for tougher voter ID requirements, or by mail, which would call for a different remedy? How many elections were covered? Had Mr. Shwedo been more careful in matching the names this time?

Mr. Shwedo said it wasn’t his job to answer those questions, and there’s some truth to that, but it should have reminded us that the Justice Department dismissed his claim about inflated numbers of ID-less voters because despite the federal agency’s attempts to verify it, “the state offered no additional supporting documentation.”

Should Ms. Andino have warned the Justice Department of Mr. Shwedo’s concerns? Probably. Should Mr. Shwedo have discussed his apparent dead-people finding with Ms. Andino before he threw around claims about illegal voting? Certainly.

We hope Ms. Andino’s testimony will cause politicians and voters to suspend judgment until the investigations are completed. We hope likewise that Mr. Shwedo and Ms. Andino will find a way to work cooperatively to sort out the numbers.

If people have been casting ballots in the names of dead people, we need to find out who they were, and prosecute them if we can, and how they did it, and correct any shortcomings in our law that allowed this to happen. And if it turns out that this was all a big … misunderstanding, the politicians who rushed to trumpet their alarmist rhetoric need to work every bit as hard and as loudly to reassure the voters that they were wrong.