About 3.4 million people were registered here in 2022, according to the S.C Election Commission’s year-end report, roughly the same as the most recent registration total listed Sept. 15, though it has fluctuated in the mean time. The state population increased by about 281,300 people between 2022 and 2025, about a 5.3 percent jump.

Those figures don’t appear to include registered voters who have been deemed “inactive,” which has included more than 1.1 million people since Dec. 1, 2021.

Voters in the category either moved, died, were convicted of a felony or, most frequently, didn’t respond to a postcard sent by the state after they hadn’t voted in the prior two general elections.

An inactive voter is not fully removed from the list of registrants, and can reactivate their registration by voting or updating their information with the SC Election Commission.

South Carolina’s deadline to register for the Nov. 3 general election is Oct. 4. People can register for the first time or check their registrations at SCVOTES.gov, or at their county board of voter registration.

The lack of growth in the state’s voter registration figures is a surprise, said Lynn Teague, vice president of the S.C. League of Women Voters. She suspects that some of the new people moving into the state from elsewhere, particularly retirees, might just not be that concerned about voting in South Carolina.

“It’s hard to blame it on the voter roll assessment at the Election Commission,” she said. “It just about has to be fewer people registering and re-registering.”

A report released earlier this month by the South Carolina ACLU on the assessment process between 2022 and 2025 found that counties with a larger non-White population saw larger declines in active registered voters than the state as a whole. Also, that scroll removal rates were higher in non-White majority counties than White-majority ones.

ACLU officials urged people to check their registrations ahead of the general election.

“South Carolina is growing, but you wouldn't know it from the voter rolls. Hundreds of thousands of people got knocked off for missing a postcard or moving across town, and it's Black and Brown communities that are paying the price,” Jace Woodrum, the group’s executive director, said in a news release.

Paul Bowers, a state ACLU spokesman, said the group isn’t sure why there was a racial disparity in the registration data.

But the relative decline in the top-line registration figure, compared with the state’s recent nation-topping growth, shows that something had gone wrong, he said.

“Democracy works better when more people participate,” he said.

A spokesperson for the S.C. Election Commission, Sydni Bain, said the agency breaks registration data down by race and age, but it’s not really possible to know why some groups of people are registered more than others.

“We want people to register to vote, but we can’t really track why they don’t register to vote in specific demographic areas,” Bain said.

South Carolina’s White population has been growing faster than any other state because of who is moving in, according to previous reporting from The Post and Courier.

The process of checking the state’s voter registration list is required by law. The commission most recently sent out more than 191,000 voter confirmation cards in April 2025, and about 23,000 recipients were confirmed as active.

The remaining 168,000 were deemed inactive, mostly after not returning the card.

Teague thinks there’s a “communication problem” with reaching voters in poorer and more rural areas, which include most of the non-White counties the ACLU identified.

That makes it harder for the state and others to stress the importance of registering or responding to the Election Commission’s active-voter checks, she said.

“A rural person who is not very affluent is less likely to be online a lot, is less likely to have reliable internet access, is less likely to be aware of the importance of something like responding to a postcard,” she said. “And frankly, I think has not been reached enough with any kind of communication about the importance of their vote.”

Teague’s organization is also concerned about voter apathy, and has found that it’s very difficult to reach people in rural areas such as the Interstate 95 corridor.

But she stressed that voters who may have been marked inactive after moving or not returning their card aren’t prevented from showing up at their polling place, or even better, checking in in-person or over the phone with their local election office to sort out their registration.

The numbers come as multiple groups have started registration initiatives. For instance, Sept. 15 is National Voter Registration Day, prompting the Congressional Black Caucus Institute to announce the launch of SO VOTE, a multi-state civic participation initiative designed to register and turn out young and low-propensity Black voters and rural voters across the South. U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., is among its backers.

Early voting for the November general election starts Oct. 19.

Read the full article at the link above.