COLUMBIA, S.C. — A new lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union claims thousands of eligible South Carolina voters may have been denied proper voter registration ahead of the election.
The lawsuit takes aim at the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles and South Carolina Election Commission for what it claims were failures to register 17-year-olds who would be 18 by Election Day.
The case is the result of one mother and her son speaking out for the many others potentially impacted.
When Kate Counts and her son Noah went to the South Carolina DMV, she said they hoped to kill two birds with one stone: get her son’s driver’s license and get him registered to vote.
"When we marked on the form for him to be registered, I did ask the person working at the DMV if that was all we needed to do to make sure that he was registered to vote," Counts recalled to WCNC Charlotte. "They told me yes.”
Months later Counts said they were shocked to find out that voter registration never happened.
"[We] went on scvotes.gov just to check and see if he was registered to vote and sure enough when I put in his information, nothing came up," she explained.
The ACLU of South Carolina is now suing the state's DMV and election commission for what they claim are more than 17,000 similar cases of 17-year-olds who were improperly denied the chance to register over the past 13 months. In total, the ACLU believes the issue goes back at least 22 years.
"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," Allen Chaney, the ACLU of South Carolina's legal director, said.
In a statement to WCNC Charlotte, the SC DMV said it’s aware of the concerns
"The agency is working with the state election commission on possible ways to remedy the issue," they wrote.
Of the 17,564 accounted for in the lawsuit, the ACLU says 6,240 were able to register through other means. The SC DMV told the ACLU they found 1,896 applications they could forward to the State Election Commission.
Like Counts, a DMV spokesperson encouraged South Carolinians to check their voter registration.
For Chaney and the ACLU, it's a race against the clock to reach those impacted ahead of Election Day.
"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," he said.
Despite the challenge Counts said her son was able to register before the deadline. He intends to cast his first ballot on Nov. 5. Counts hopes the lawsuit will permit other young voters to do the same.
"We really don’t want them to think that it was their fault that they did something wrong on their part," she said. "So, when we did see the lawsuit, yes we were angry, but at the same time we were relieved.”
WCNC Charlotte reached out to the state election commission for comment but as of the time of publication, has not yet received a response.
Contact Kayland Hagwood at khagwood@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram.