South Carolina: Documenting Your Vote

This page covers information specific to South Carolina. For general information regarding legal issues associated with documenting your vote, see the Documenting Your Vote section of this guide.

We have not analyzed South Carolina's laws regulating polling place activities yet, but we received the following communication from a South Carolina State Election Commission official: 

There is no statute explicitly prohibiting cameras in the polling place.  However, there are statutes dealing with voter intimidation, ballot secrecy, and keeping order in the polling place.  We do instruct poll managers to ask voters not to use cameras, cell phones, PDAs, etc in the polling places for several reasons:

• Out of courtesy to others.  Voters may be distracted or annoyed by other voters using these items.

• To prevent intimidation.  Voters can be intimidated by the use of a camera in a polling place.

• To protect the secrecy of the ballot.