The two-week early voting period starts this morning with thousands of voters across the state casting their ballots for the June 9 primaries, even as the Senate is set to decide whether those congressional primary votes will count.
A divided Senate voted in a rare Saturday session to advance a new congressional map and language to reschedule the congressional primaries until mid-August. The move, if approved by the Senate, would lead to current congressional primary votes being discarded. The rest of the ballot would be counted.
The big Senate vote today will be whether Republicans in favor of the expedited map, which has received limited vetting and public input, can muster 26 votes to stop a filibuster and limit debate by invoking a measure called cloture. The body barely did so on Saturday, by a vote of 26-18, before a second reading vote and carrying over amendments to Tuesday’s debate.
Under current Senate rules, two days must pass before cloture can be invoked on the on a reapportionment bill and the Senate did not have the two-thirds, or 31, vote needed to suspend that rule. This rule applied to the second reading debate and the third and final reading debate, which senators start today.
Instead of debating the entire holiday weekend, which would’ve put the chamber in essentially the same spot, senators said Sunday and Monday would count as legislative days, carried over amendments and gave the map a second reading vote of 27-17. Six Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the map—Sens. Sean Bennett, Chip Campsen, Tom Davis, Greg Hembree, Shane Massey, and Luke Rankin. All six serve as committee chairmen.
Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, encouraged voters to get to the polls as the numbers will be part of a future lawsuit, should the new map make it to the governor’s desk for his signature.
“People that vote for cloture on Tuesday are actually voting to disenfranchise voters who are actually standing in line at the polls at the very time that that vote will be taken,” Hutto said. “We feel that there is a reasonable chance that there’s not going to be the cloture votes [needed].”
Sen. Larry Grooms, R-Berkeley, has been driving the redistricting train in the Senate as Republican Leader Massey and other top Republicans have stepped aside as they are not in favor of the entire expedited process pushed by the White House. Grooms said Friday that voting on Tuesday and beyond would be an issue for him.
“The goal was always to have this bill in place before early voting begins on Tuesday,” Grooms said. “This debate can continue to drag on well past Tuesday, well into early voting and I think that’s wrong. There are other members, like me, who are supportive of this legislation, but not supportive of passing this legislation after tens of thousands of South Carolinians have already cast votes in person on a voting machine.”
Redistricting happens after every decennial census is done to show which areas of a state have grown or shrunk and congressional lines are drawn to reflect those populations. One district typically encompasses about 761,000 people. It’s an intensive process, done by House and Senate lawmakers, over the course of months. It includes several public hearings in Columbia and around the state as lawmakers craft a map with help from the public and professionals.
South Carolina’s most recent map was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2024. The court ruled the map was a partisan gerrymander, overruling a lower court ruling say it was racially gerrymandered. Even under the April 29 Louisiana v. Callais decision, which was a racial gerrymander, South Carolina’s maps are still constitutional.
That didn’t stop the governor on May 14 from calling a special legislative session for lawmakers to take up a new map.
This process has been condensed into three weeks with House Republicans approving a map drawn by the Republican Redistricting Trust. The director of the group gave about eight minutes of testimony before a House Judiciary subcommittee and did not appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. Republicans opposed to the push have cited concerns on whether the map will help them pick up the 6th District seat, occupied by Congressman Jim Clyburn.
The process is also set to cost upwards of $6 million, not counting county costs, and would require a tight turnaround to have ballots in place for a proposed August 18 congressional primary.
Under the proposed map, several candidates running would no longer be in districts they’re seeking to represent.
Should this new map be passed by the Senate and signed into law by the governor, lawsuits are immediately set to be filed. Which then raises concerns over the June 1-5 filing period for the August primary and whether the map will ever even be implemented for the 2026 election cycle.
“The courts are going to have to decide whether they're going to immediately enjoin or whether they need to study this a little bit,” Massey said. “You're creating a scenario where filing for the for the congressional seats, the newly drawn congressional seats, would be on June 1st, which is next Monday. So you've got that scenario playing out, too, that the courts are going to have to figure out whether there's sufficient notice for all that, how that all works.”
