We are planning a $15,000 digital marketing campaign to reach 500,000 families with unregistered female residents aged 18-35 before the November general election. A million digital ads will direct these women to VOTE411 to register to vote, to learn about candidates, and to prepare to vote.

Thanks to those who’ve already responded to our appeal, we have raised $11,600 toward our goal. But we need to raise an additional $3400 to launch this campaign in late summer.

South Carolina Daily Gazette

Compared with other employers that states compete for, such as automotive plants, data centers hire relatively few workers. Still, states have offered massive subsidies to lure data centers. Lynn Teague, VP, SC League of Women Voters, said South Carolinians, including more than 700,000 people living in poverty, shouldn’t have to pick up the tab for tax or utility breaks for major data center firms. “We have companies like Google with over $300 billion in revenues a year wanting these folks to subsidize their profit margin at the same time that they’re putting intense pressure on not just our energy, but our water,” she said.

South Carolina Daily Gazette

South Carolina has at least four large data center projects in the works, collectively needing an estimated 800 megawatts of power daily. But advocates for consumers also have questioned deals utilities and county governments have made with data center developers. “Data centers are doing nothing to deserve a special deal,” Lynn Teague, a lobbyist for the League of Women Voters, previously told the SC Daily Gazette. “They should at least make them pay their way.”

The Statehouse Report

A controversial bill that promises to meet South Carolina’s growing energy needs by ramping up in-state power production is headed to the S.C. House floor next week with bipartisan support, despite fierce opposition from many of the state’s leading consumer and environmental groups. “We absolutely understand there’s a need for more energy generation,” S.C. League of Women Voters President Lynn Teague told Statehouse Report. “But the General Assembly should not be intruding on the decisions that are supposed to be made by state regulatory agencies.” Of particular concern, she said, were a provision allowing utilities to meet with regulators behind closed doors, and the decision to put economic interests, rather than the concerns of ratepayers, at the heart of the regulatory process. “When government grants a monopoly to utilities, it’s giving them a very big asset,” Teague said. “And it’s the state’s absolute responsibility to protect the public from abuse of that asset.”