news-record.com

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — More than 74,000 people who skipped voting in past elections may have been excluded from data used to estimate how many voters lack state-issued identification that's at the heart of South Carolina's new law requiring photo IDs to vote, the State Election Commission said Friday.

Under the new law, people have to present photographic identification at precinct polling places to cast regular ballots. The data crunching is important because it will be used to reach out to voters to make sure they know about the change, an issue the U.S. Justice Department is concerned about as it reviews the law.

There's enough question about the data that the state on Friday delayed filing responses to the U.S. Justice Department's questions about the new voter ID law, Deputy Attorney General Bryan Stirling said.

"We obviously need to analyze their processes and their methods," Stirling said.

Earlier this week, the Election Commission said nearly 217,000 registered voters in the state lack a state driver's license or photo ID. That already was nearly 40,000 more than the election agency had previously estimated.

Election Commission spokesman Chris Whitmire said data used to match state driver's license and identification card data excluded about 117,000 inactive voters. That figure includes a mix of people who had died, moved, been convicted of crimes that suspend their voting rights or hadn't voted since 2006.

The state marked 74,511 voters as inactive in 2009 because they hadn't voted in general elections in 2006 or 2008. Whitmire didn't have an estimate of how many of those voters subsequently became active because they voted in the 2010 election.

Meanwhile, the state Department of Motor Vehicles said Friday its data excluded people who didn't renew driver's licenses or state ID cards on their birthdays. The agency said it had no way of estimating how many of the 4 million holding those credentials missed renewal deadlines when the snapshot of drivers and ID card holders was made.

South Carolina's past voting law abuses mean the Justice Department must approve election law changes under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The Justice Department already has asked about how the state will educate voters on the new law and just how many people may lack identification. It specifically asked for information on registered voters.

The Election Commission told state attorney general's office on Sept. 13 that the data it was collecting would show "a list of registered voters and demographic statistics of those voters."

Inactive voters remain registered votes. Whitmire said a voter would have to skip four general elections in order to be dropped from the rolls.

Asked about the difference, Whitmire said the state has traditionally only included active voters in its data. "When we talk about the number of registered voters in South Carolina, we mean active, registered voters," he said.

Stirling was unsure whether that squared with what the U.S. Justice Department wanted.

Republicans including Gov. Nikki Haley pushed the law change, saying it would make elections more secure and prevent fraud. Democrats said the law change would cost people their voting rights and that no cases had been reported of citizens posing as someone else to vote.

News that inactive, but registered, voters weren't even included in the effort to find voters without identification alarmed state Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian.

"It indicates that they're not thinking through the process and are being very cavalier about it," Harpootlian said. "The Justice Department needs to give it a lot more scrutiny to it because obviously the Haley Administration has not given it the serious attention it deserves."

Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey said the governor has "made it abundantly clear that we want more South Carolinians voting, not less — we just think it's good policy for them to show a photo ID. Most South Carolinians agree with us and we're not entirely concerned that chairman of the Democrat Party doesn't."

State Sen. Gerald Malloy fought the legislation and continues to challenge it at the Justice Department. Supporters are now working with inaccurate data that will create flawed assumptions about the law's effects, the Hartsville Democrat said.

The data questions "sort of supersized it. It makes it a much larger problem than they anticipated," Malloy said. "They just continue to give clubs to the opponents to hit them upside the head with."