The South Carolina Judiciary Committee will hear testimony on SB 590 on Tuesday, January 26, at 3 p.m, in room 105 of the Gressette Building. SB 590 says that independent candidate petitions may not be signed by people who voted in a primary. It also says that no one may vote if that person had not been registered to vote at least 30 days before the petition is submitted.

The bill had been introduced last year, but had not moved. An identical bill in the House, HB3746, had passed the House Judiciary Committee on April 22, 2009, but had not made further progress.

The bill would almost surely be held unconstitutional if it passed. South Carolina laws for independent candidates for district office are already so harsh, no independent candidate for U.S. House has ever qualified for a government-printed ballot in that state. The law requires 10,000 signatures for a U.S. House candidate. The U.S. Supreme Court said in Storer v Brown in 1974 that when a state combines a hefty petition requirement with a primary screenout, that the combination of the two means that courts should invalidate the law if the historical evidence shows that independent candidates rarely qualify.

South Carolina and North Carolina are the only two states in which no independent candidate for U.S. House has ever appeared on a government-printed ballot. The North Carolina independent petition procedure is under attack in federal court.

The part of SB 590 that says voters can’t sign unless they have been registered to vote for 30 days before the petition is clearly unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court summarily affirmed a 3-judge U.S. District Court in 1970 from New York. One of the holdings in that 1970 decision, Socialist Workers Party v Rockefeller, was that it is unconstitutional to bar newly-registered voters from signing petitions. Thanks to Bryan Sells for the news about the South Carolina bill.

Anyone checking past South Carolina election returns for Congress should be aware that in South Carolina, independent candidates are called “By petition” candidates, on the ballot and in the official election returns. There was an Independent Party on the ballot in South Carolina in the 1970’s, which had candidates for U.S. House, but those candidates were not independent candidates.