SC election skeptics aren’t going away. They’re getting organized for 2024.

AIKEN – Soon after Cynthia Holland started working at the Aiken County elections office nearly a quarter of a century ago, she discovered democracy was her passion.

Now, it’s a lot harder for Holland, who became the office’s director 12 years ago, to love her job.

Like so many elections officials around the state, she’s tired and frustrated.

Tired of the stream of Freedom of Information requests that have bombarded her office in the wake of the stolen election myth, about 30, seeking her emails, information on voting records and even office security camera footage.

Frustrated at the appearance of activists who packed the seats of the monthly board meetings, and the self-appointed poll watchers who showed up in all 86 precincts during the 2022 primaries, convinced they know how to do her job better than she does.

Then in July 2022, a woman who was an organizer for a national group that endorsed claims of widespread voter fraud was appointed to the board of elections, putting an activist on the body that oversees Holland.

Holland’s anxiety has worsened to the point her doctor put her on medication.

“It’s downright lies,” Holland said. “They’re trying to target my integrity and not looking at the bigger picture – it’s not about me.”

In counties across South Carolina, it’s like the 2020 election never ended.

For instance, in Berkeley County this winter, a North Charleston woman challenged the registration of more than 100 voters, creating days of work for elections officials.

In Beaufort County, one activist demanded the elections director hand over information or he’d call the sheriff, the elections director there said.

And a group of voters from around the state filed a federal lawsuit in August 2022 to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Rather than fade away, the movement born of former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud has trained and organized under the banner of “election integrity” 2½ years after Trump routed President Joe Biden by nearly 300,000 votes in the Palmetto State.

“Their aim is to make our lives hell. And I’ve had activists in this state tell me that personally,” said Howie Knapp, executive director of the South Carolina Election Commission.

As 2024 approaches, many officials don’t believe an end is in sight.

“I don’t see it going away,” said Isaac Cramer, executive director of the Charleston County Board of Elections. “Honestly, I just don’t.”

There is no evidence of election fraud in South Carolina, other than a few investigations of small-town municipal elections, Knapp told a state Senate panel this winter. Elections skeptics’ efforts have not led to, or assisted in, the discovery of a single case of election fraud here, he told The Post and Courier.

By contrast, skeptics’ efforts may be making elections less secure, as voting office administrators devote hours or even days to responding to a stream of sprawling 2020-related FOIA requests or quit the profession altogether, fed up with constant attacks on their integrity, officials around the state say.

FOIA requests to the state Election Commission are up 500 percent compared to before the 2020 election, Knapp said. Charleston County used to receive a few requests each year. Now, a new one comes in almost weekly, Cramer said.

Many county officials point to a group called SC Safe Elections as the primary organizer of the state’s election skeptics.

Laura Scharr, a Lexington County financial planner, founded SC Safe Elections after she became interested in elections while “watching the election in 2020. And I said, ‘Something’s just not right.’”

The group now advocates for a return to paper ballots, elimination of early voting and giving control of elections to towns or even precincts. It’s also become Scharr’s full-time job, and she’s spent, she estimates, at least $35,000 of her own money on its efforts.

“It’s 24/7. It’s the weekend. It’s all the time,” she said.

The group’s latest effort is a FOIA lawsuit against the Election Commission and several county elections offices over their refusal to give activists “cast vote records” — basically electronic records of a voter’s ballot selections. The two sides have been slugging it out for months in court.

The organization has 439 members in its private chat group, and about 10 or 20 percent of those are core active members, Scharr said. But at a July 10 court hearing, a lawyer for the state Election Commission in the records lawsuit said Scharr’s lawyer told him the group had 10 members this spring.

Some determined individuals have also made their mark.

Last winter, a woman named Tara Palubicki challenged the voter registration of more than 150 voters in Berkeley County. Elections staff there spent days investigating each case and sent out letters to the challenged voters, county Elections Director Rose Brown said.

The elections office then held two hearings for some of the challenged voters to prove they were registered at their legal address, Brown said.

“There were a few that were quite livid,” Brown said of the people forced to attend hearings, some of whom had lived and voted at the same address for more than 20 years.

Brown referred some of the voters who didn’t respond to the letters requesting they verify their addresses to the state Election Commission to check if they had moved or died, but the county elections office never found a case of voter fraud, Brown said.

A message requesting comment left on a voicemail for Palubicki was not returned.

By far, the election skeptics’ biggest push came during the June 2022 primaries when hundreds of self-designated poll watchers fanned out to polling stations across the state. Elections officials reported that while many were respectful, others harangued poll workers to the point that police were called in a few cases.

The incidents prompted the state Election Commission to roll out new rules for poll watchers, forcing them to obtain a letter from a candidate or party they represent, show photo ID and banning them from touching equipment or harassing poll workers.

Now, in a handful of counties, activists are seeking to oust elections directors or get on the boards that oversee them, Knapp said.

In Berkeley County, after several poll watchers and activists criticized Brown, the elections director, others in attendance, including the president of the Goose Creek NAACP, stood to defend Brown and accused the activists of trying to push her out, according to the minutes of the board’s May meeting.

In Aiken, Lori Boddy was appointed to the board of elections in July 2022. Boddy organized the county’s GOP poll watchers during elections in 2021 and June 2022 and served as state coordinator for the national organization Look Ahead America, which shared claims that there was potentially widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, according to the Associated Press.

When Boddy and two other like-minded appointees joined the board, the tone changed, said Blanche Wimberly, the Aiken board of elections’ vice chairwoman.

“It’s just been a source of contention because it seems as though they had agendas that the rest of us were concerned about,” she said.

Holland said the trio would try to micromanage the office, go behind her back and want her ousted.

Boddy rejected those accusations. She supports Holland, strongly disagrees with other activists’ calls to return to paper-only balloting and “wasn’t a person who thought there was widespread fraud” in 2020, she said.

She sees herself as ensuring that veteran elections officials and poll workers, who can sometimes be set in their ways, adapt to new technology and South Carolina’s changing election laws while being transparent.

She became involved with Look Ahead America, she said, due to its work advocating for cleaned-up voter rolls.

There’s a national narrative, Boddy said, “if you talk about election integrity, it equals election denier.”

No South Carolina election is 100 percent without mistakes or human error or errant training or misapplication of rules. The errors are sometimes serious ones, like when a printing company sent 1,377 Horry County Republican voters Democratic primary ballots during a hotly contested state Senate race in 2022.

In the same 2022 primary, Beaufort County omitted County Council candidates’ names on 70 early-vote ballots, and in Aiken, poll workers failed to count eight provisional ballots that should have been included.

Poll watchers have documented election law violations in two main areas: Some counties have failed to swear in their poll workers with oaths as legally required and a few security seals weren’t fastened across the memory drives in voting machines at polling places, according to their reporting confirmed by some county elections officials.

Additionally, nearly everything the activists do is legal and much of it — seeking public records, attending public meetings, questioning government officials — is straight out of Civics 101.

“We’re elections geeks,” said Margie Schelps, one of the leading election activists in Aiken County. Activists say elections officials and the media wield the label “election denier” to dismiss legitimate concerns.

Many activists only became interested in elections after the 2020 election.

“We just coincidentally got together and have the same interests,” Schelps said. Asked whether she believed Biden was legitimately elected president, Schelps said she had “no comment.”

Asked the same question, Scharr, the SC Safe Elections’ leader, said she did not think that “was for me to answer,” but that in South Carolina, Trump “probably had more votes than what was there. I don’t know.”

After two years of constant interactions with the activists, elections officials doubt they’re acting in good faith.

Adam Hammons, the elections director in Spartanburg County, said his interactions with his local election activists have been “super cordial,” and he’s glad more people are learning about elections.

“The biggest thing that bothers me about any of those discussions (is) if you offered to show them, offer to bring them in, they come in, they see and then they still don’t believe or they still want to challenge you,” he said.

Andrew Marine, chairman of the Aiken County Board of Elections, believes that with time, activists’ engagement with the process will restore their trust.

“What we found is once they’ve gotten involved in the process, they realize there’s not a conspiracy there that they thought was there,” Marine said. Yet, he added, “we’re still in that transition period.”

Decidedly not in a wait-and-see mood, the state Election Commission has recently taken a harder line against the activists. Knapp started charging people to complete FOIA requests. And in the ongoing cast-vote records lawsuit, the Election Commission countersued SC Safe Elections under the FOIA law, seeking a court order to bar the organization’s members from filing more requests related to the 2020 election.

Officials say the solution to improving the state’s elections is to better fund and staff elections offices and expand poll worker training.

In an audit of the Aiken County office, the state Election Commission found the major factor that caused the eight provisional ballots to go uncounted and other shortcomings was insufficient staff to conduct poll worker training.

Four employees work in the Aiken County office serving a population of about 171,000 residents. Departments in other counties of equivalent size have higher budgets and double the number of employees, the audit found. The Aiken County Council has repeatedly refused Holland’s budget requests for more full-time staff.

State budget writers gave the state Election Commission an extra $3.2 million to train and support county elections offices in this year’s budget.

Many activists, like Scharr, think the state needs to invest more in its elections.

Officials argue the skeptics’ efforts actually jeopardize elections by taking an inordinate amount of officials’ time to respond to 2020-related FOIA requests rather than preparing for voting.

“There will be more retiring pretty soon because you can only take so much,” said Marie Smalls, the elections director in Beaufort County.

Twenty-one of the state’s 46 counties saw an election director vacancy between January 2020 and the end of 2022, according to the election commission’s latest annual report.

July 14 was Hammons’ last day as a South Carolina election official after 16 years. The decision was partially because he got a good opportunity in the private sector but he probably wouldn’t have considered it three or four years ago, he said.

“It wears on you to be constantly challenged,” the Spartanburg County elections director said.

It isn’t just county directors who are leaving.

“Not only are we losing some of our star players,” Knapp said. “We’re also losing the bench.”

Half of Charleston County’s veteran poll managers quit over the past few years, as The Post and Courier previously reported.

Aiken County’s director Holland has decided to hold out four more years to retirement.

“I want to leave on my terms,” she said. “Not because a group does not think that I’m fit to do my job when they have no cause, so that’s just how I am.”