The South Carolina State Election Commission published a statement around Thursday 16 July declaring its eligibility review "completed" and barring anyone who cast a ballot in June's Democratic primary from voting in the special Republican primary, leaving June Republican voters and June non-voters eligible1. Commission director Conway Belangia grounded the bar in "the requirements of South Carolina election law"2.
Which requirements went unnamed. The statement cites no statute and no attorney-general opinion. We read Section 7-11-55 directly, the provision reporting has attributed the ruling to: it governs the nomination calendar and candidate substitution, and it contains no voter-eligibility language at all. The commission has ruled. The ground it ruled on has not been stated.
South Carolina holds open primaries, which is what makes the exclusion consequential rather than technical. A voter who chose a Democratic ballot in June made no party registration and gave no undertaking, because the state does not ask for one. The commission imposed the bar in July, on ballots cast in June, under a rule it has not identified.
FITSNews, a South Carolina outlet, reports that the Justice Department is reviewing four distinct violations in the special-election timeline, and that roughly 1,000 military and overseas voters cast June primary ballots, only 48 of them by mail3. Neither claim appears in the commission's own statement, which makes no mention of the Justice Department. Any such review would arrive from a department currently seeking en banc rehearing over Michigan's voter file, which is to say from an enforcer with a settled view on who may police a state's rolls.
A barred in-state voter is also far easier to identify and join to a case than a scattered overseas cohort, which is why this ruling, rather than the ballot-transmission question, is the likelier route into court before filing closes on 28 July.
