Locally Speaking

S.C. Considers Second ALEC Voting Bill

South Carolina is again considering a bill from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to limit access to the ballot box. A nearly identical version of an ALEC voting bill is moving through the state Senate and comes on the heels of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) blocking South Carolina's ALEC-inspired voter ID law as discriminatory against people of color.

State Senator Chip Campsen (R), an ALEC member, introduced SB 304, which is almost a mirror-image of the ALEC Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (pdf). The bill requires proof of citizenship to register to vote and has opened up a new round of debate over voting rights.

DOJ Blocked S.C. Voter ID in December

In May 2011, South Carolina was part of a wave of states to pass restrictive voting measures using the ALEC model Voter ID Act as a template (Sen. Campsen also co-sponsored the voter ID bill). According to the ACLU, the law would disenfranchise 180,000 voters in the state, primarily people of color, students, and the elderly.

In December, the DOJ rejected South Carolina's voter ID law, noting that the state's registered population of minority voters was 20 percent more likely than whites to not have the required identification. Based on its history of discriminating against African-American voters, South Carolina is one of several states that under Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act needs federal pre-approval for changes to voting qualifications or procedures.

Critics say the voter ID laws are a politically-motivated effort to limit voting by people of color and college students -- populations that typically vote for Democrats. According to a report issued by the NAACP, across the country 25 percent of African Americans (over 6.2 million African-American voters) and 16 percent of Latinos (over 2.96 million Latino voters) do not possess state-issued photo IDs.

Supporters of the laws allege that an ID requirement is necessary to combat voter fraud, despite almost no evidence that it exists (pdf). The DOJ acknowledged this reality when it blocked South Carolina's law, writing that the state "did not include any evidence or instance of either in-person voter impersonation or any other type of fraud that is not already addressed by the state's existing voter identification requirement and that arguably could be deterred by requiring voters to present only photo identification at the polls."

ALEC Round Two

With South Carolina's voter ID law blocked, GOP legislators turned to another ALEC model that would limit access to the ballot box. On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee South Carolina passed SB 304, which was introduced by Sen. Campsen and is nearly identical to the ALEC Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (pdf). See the side-by-side here. The bill now heads to the full Judiciary Committee.

Campsen insists that the bill is not an effort to rehash voter ID. "This bill is about determining someone's citizenship," he said, "to make sure that people who are not U.S. citizens do not vote."

Where the voter ID law required voters to show a passport, military ID, or state-issued ID to vote, SB 304 would require "proof of citizenship" in order to register to vote -- meaning voters must show a passport, military ID, state-issued ID, a birth certificate, or naturalization documents.

With both SB 304 and voter ID placing very similar burdens on voters, they'll have the same functional impact, says Sen. John Scott (D), the only member of the three-person subcommittee to vote against the bill. "They're just another way of prohibiting people from voting," he said.

Little Doubt that ALEC Served as Voter ID Model

SB 304 is almost a mirror-image of the ALEC model, greatly strengthening the inference that ALEC served as the source for the outbreak of voter ID bills that swept the country in 2011.

The 2011 voter ID bills clearly had ALEC DNA but spotting it required dissecting the proposals. In most states, the voter ID bills amended sections in an election statute rather than creating new ones. This meant that provisions from the ALEC model had to be shoehorned into an existing piece of legislation, which involved changing language and reordering the ALEC provisions. Finding the ALEC roots required taking the bill apart and putting it back together.

SB 304, though, creates entirely new sections in South Carolina's elections statutes, and no alteration is necessary. This makes the ALEC influence immediately apparent. See the side-by-side of the ALEC model and SB 304 here.

"Illegals" and "Zombie" Voters

In voting against SB 304 / the Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, Sen. Scott said there is no evidence that non-citizens are voting in South Carolina. The state's Department of Motor Vehicles and Election Commission is reportedly looking into whether any non-citizens have voted.

The Commission's examination comes soon after the head of the Department of Motor Vehicles claimed that more than 950 dead people had voted in South Carolina over the past six years. The claim was repeated on Fox News and other outlets as proof of "voter fraud" (and an example of why the blocked voter ID law was necessary), but fell apart after the Election Commission examined the data. Of the names the department was allowed to examine, all were alive and eligible to vote. –PR Watch

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Horry County ABATE Group Unhappy About Change To Harley Rally

Horry County ABATE has decided to stage a boycott, not of the spring bike rally, but of the Myrtle Beach Harley-Davidson store and its owner Phil Schoonover unless he retreats from his plan to hold the Harley-Davidson Spring Cruisin’ the Coast rally from May 18-28.

Schoonover’s plan to hold biker rally events later in May than other Harley-related rally activities and to blend his rally with Atlantic Beach Bike Fest has angered the ABATE group because, Coordinator Gary Balcom said, it’s a bad idea and was not discussed with anyone else.

“The dust just got settled with Horry County, and now this has upset the county council all over again,” Balcom said, recalling Councilman Gary Loftus’s recent comments.

When Loftus heard about Schoonover’s plan to hold his rally later in the month -- leaving other Spring Bike Rally events to be held earlier and, in effect, adding 10 more days of Harley-related rally events -- he recommended council members discuss yanking vendor permits in the month of May.

“They just don’t seem to want to play by whatever rules we set,” Loftus said at a meeting two weeks ago.

But ‘there’s no ‘they’ in this,” Balcom said. “This was a one-man decision.”

Schoonover is in Las Vegas this week at a Harley-Davidson expo and could not be reached for comment.

In 2008, following the city of Myrtle Beach’s efforts to push the May rallies outside city limits, the county restricted the number of vending permits for May and limited the length of time for any one permit to seven days. The effect was to make the rally shorter and less impactful on the area, a move that angered motorcycle riders and their supporters.

The city and county efforts, including Myrtle Beach’s now-defunct helmet law, stirred up a lot of controversy, and the first year after the changes, Spring Bike Rally attendance was noticeably lower than in previous years.

But Balcom said the attendance was better last year and the controversy had died down.

“We definitely don’t want to step on anyone’s toes,” Balcom said. “We had already hashed it out, battled it out, and it was fine.”

Plus, he said, it’s too late in the game to change plans for this year, especially because other venues have already announced plans for the Spring Bike Rally.

“I wish we could have all sat down together and talked about this,” Balcom said.

The dates announced by the dealership carry the Spring Cruisin’ the Coast rally right into Memorial Day weekend, which has, for more than 30 years, been the weekend of sport-bike rider oriented Atlantic Beach Bike Fest. That weekend is also now shared with the culmination of the city of Myrtle Beach’s Military Appreciation Days, which draws military members and their families from several states.

From the perspective of some residents and officials, that makes three whole weeks of rallies, because organizers of other non-sport-bike related rallies have plans for May 10-20.

“Two bike rallies, Memorial Day events and the regular tourists who just like to come in May?

That’s too many people in one place at one time,” Balcom said. “That’s what got this whole thing started in the first place.”

Denise Medlin, marketing manager for Myrtle Beach Harley-Davidson, the dealership just south of Myrtle Beach city limits, wanted to set the record straight:

“We are not trying to run over anyone’s event,” she said. “We are trying to give tourists more options. It just happens that another event is going on, but the more the merrier.”

The whole issue has become confused, she said, because people are thinking of this as an “extension” of “the rally.”

As far as MBHD is concerned, the Cruisin’ the Coast rally is “the rally,” and all the other events that are organized by other merchants earlier in May do not have Harley-Davidson’s sponsorship. But Cruisin’ the Coast began in the mid-1990s, long after what was known simply as the Spring Bike Rally began 71 years ago.

Myrtle Beach Harley-Davidson dealership owner Phil Schoonover branded the event Cruisin’ the Coast in the early 2000s, but the event overlapped with the spring rally. The first third of May included all the Harley-related “bike week” events that had blended into one large, if not centrally organized, rally that always ended the week before Bike Fest began.

Many people say that when the dealership got involved is when the rally began to grow to the huge proportions that eventually riled residents and community leaders enough to spark new rules in 2008 and a ban on May vendors in Myrtle Beach proper.

This year, Medlin said, Schoonover decided to change the dates for Cruisin’ the Coast, in part to “conserve resources for the county,” a goal she said county leaders had discussed with Schoonover for years, saying it would be less demanding on the county if Cruisin’ the Coast and Atlantic Beach Bike Fest were closer together.

County spokeswoman Lisa Bourcier said to her knowledge, there has not been any discussion about the bike rallies since the county changed the rules for vendor permits.

“Yes, we’d like to see the rally go back to the length it was (before the new regulations, there were nearly three straight weeks of Harley-related events and gatherings on the Grand Strand), but he should use the earlier part of the month. Give the county a break in between the rallies,” Balcom said.

There have already been discussions on social media outlets over which is the “real” rally.

“We hadn’t even announced the dates yet,” Medlin said. “Some people just jumped the gun.”

Some businesses, like SBB, have said on social media outlets that they are not involved with the dealership, that the rally is independent of the dealership’s plans, and that it doesn’t matter what the dealership plans to do, they are still going to hold their events when they want.

All this has raised questions of vendor permits, which the county limits to no longer than seven days, and says must be affiliated with an event.

The county considers the rally, no matter what it is called, to be the one that takes place between May 14 and 20, and it will issue vendor permits for that week starting in April, Bourcier said.

Harley-Davidson can apply for its vendor permits in conjunction with Bike Fest later in the month, she said.

But there are other concerns, too, Balcom said.

The large crowd would overwhelm local law enforcement resources, he wrote in an ABATE statement sent out Thursday.

“The last thing we want to see is any event getting out of hand,” Balcom wrote.

The statement encourages bikers to boycott “all the dealerships and clothing outlets that are owned by Phil Schoonover, and we hope that the biker community as a whole will come together with us on this boycott until such time as Mr. Schoonover retracts his plan of the overlapping dates he has proposed for this year.”

The statement calls Schoonover’s decision a “slap in the face to the county council,” and says it is not in keeping with the wishes of the larger part of the biker community.

Balcom and many others hope the county will not pull the vendor permits all together, because that, they said would really damage many of the mom-and-pop businesses that cater to the motorcycle community.

The county intends to discuss Schoonover’s plans, vendor permits and other rally-related issues at its committee of the whole meeting, 9 a.m. Feb. 14 at the Horry County Government and Justice Center in Conway. –Myrtle Beach Online