By admin 
A recent ruling by a three-judge 4th Circuit Court of Appeals panel that it’s unconstitutional to give South Carolina seniors the privilege of “no excuses” voting by mail is being appealed by the S.C. Election Commission.
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For the time being, at least, the Election Commission is planning to allow South Carolina seniors 65 years old and older to vote by mail without providing a reason in the upcoming November election.
“We are not changing the law. The law is what it is, and we are not changing that until everything’s heard,” said Conway Belangia, Commission executive director.
“It is before the courts, and it is an ongoing lawsuit,” Belangia said. “We have not been told to change the law.”
The unanimous Aug. 18 decision by the Court of Appeals said that South Carolina’s election law giving people 65 and older the right to “no excuses” voting by mail creates a “favored class” of older voters and denies those younger than 65 the convenience of “no excuses” voting by mail.
In effect, South Carolina’s law discriminates against younger voters because they can’t vote by mail as easily as voters 65 and older, the Court of Appeals panel wrote.
“A voting law cannot make it harder for one group to vote than another because of their age,” the Court of Appeals panel said. “Having the option to cast an absentee-by-mail ballot increases the convenience and ease of voting. That means voting is harder for voters under age sixty-five than those age sixty-five and older.”
Besides allowing people 65 and older the right to “no excuses” voting by mail, South Carolina law has vote-by-mail exceptions for people in the military, people who are disabled and people who are admitted to hospitals in medical emergencies right before an election.
Thus, South Carolina has a two-tiered election system relating to age: “voters 65 and older may vote absentee by mail in any election for any reason, while voters under 65 may vote absentee by mail only if they qualify under one of four narrow enumerated excuses,” the three-judge panel wrote.
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Under the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, the right of a person 18 years or older to vote “shall not be denied or abridged … by any State on account of age,” the federal panel noted. While South Carolina’s law does not deny people under the age of 65 the right to vote, the law does abridge, or limit, that right when it comes to voting by mail compared to the favored treatment given to those 65 years or older, the panel said.
The panel ordered that the matter be sent back to the federal court in South Carolina “to determine the appropriate remedy for the Twenty-Sixth Amendment violation we have identified — either extending the benefit of “no excuse” absentee-by-mail voting to voters under age 65, or removing the benefit provided to voters age 65 and older.”
The panel said it would not put a deadline on any “appropriate remedy” and indicated that was because the November elections are “imminent” and that might cause voter confusion.
The ruling was written by Judge Roger Gregory of Virginia and joined by Judge Pamela Harris of Maryland and Judge Julius “Jay” Richardson of Columbia, South Carolina. The Fourth Circuit is made up of South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland.
The lawsuit against the Election Commission was brought in U.S. District Court in Charleston in 2023 by four citizens under the age of 65 — Trudy Grant, Sarah Krawcheck, Nashonda Hunter and Max Milliken.
Federal Judge Bruce Hendricks granted a defense motion dismissing the lawsuit. The plaintiffs appealed to the Fourth Circuit.
HEADED TO U.S. SUPREME COURT?
Adam Liptak, who covers the U.S. Supreme Court for the New York Times, has written that the South Carolina voting age discrimination case is “a good candidate for Supreme Court review, as it created a split among federal appeals courts.”
The Fifth Circuit upheld a similar Texas law making distinctions based on age in mail-in voting, and the Seventh Circuit did the same with one from Indiana, Liptak wrote.
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