Thanks to recalcitrance in the House, the state will not get the much-discussed voter ID bill this year.

The bill, a contentious one this year on the heels of President Obama’s impressive turnout in last year’s presidential race, would have required voters to show a state photo ID at polling precincts before being allowed to cast their ballots. The bill will likely be re-filed in time for next session, sources say.

Budget Control Board to live?

Last week, the word out of the Statehouse was that Gov. Mark Sanford had finally killed the Budget and Control Board via a sustained $25 million gubernatorial budget veto. This week, it’s a whole different story.

Apparently, maneuvering by Sanford has cleared the way -- perhaps an accident, perhaps not -- to allow the cash-strapped board access to rainy-day funds that could keep it on life support.  The board’s unique structure allows members from the legislative and executive branches to adjust the state’s annual budget and spending mid-year, making for an arguably more responsive structure than other states.

Through the years, Sanford has hated the board since he lost control of the voting interest following his ally Thomas Ravenel having to step down as treasurer due to cocaine charges. Now with the funding shortfall, we'll see what happens. (Think it will be a power play?)

Especially if you’re a candidate for attorney general, the person who is supposed to enforce state laws. (That’s you, GOP nominee Alan Wilson.)

According to South Carolina law (code section 57-25-10), it is illegal for political signs to be placed on highway rights of way and “visible from the main traveled way of the highway.  A person violating this section is guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, may be charged not more than $100 or imprisoned for not more than 30 days.”

Interestingly, a different section of state law says it is also illegal for individuals to put political signs on private property if they are visible from interstates or federal highways and in place for more than 90 days. 

It’s pretty clear that most candidates, or at least their campaign volunteers, put signs all over South Carolina’s 47,000 miles of highways and byways, regardless of the law. 

But that doesn’t make it right. 

Wilson campaign spokesman Adam Piper said the campaign asked its volunteers to put signs only in legal locations. But some, he said, may have been overzealous. In fact, to highlight how much free help the campaign had, he emphasized that Wilson volunteers logged more than 100,000 grassroots phone calls in the two-week runoff period. 

“The last thing we want to do is have signs where they are not supposed to be or have signs that are wasting our resources,” Piper said. “That doesn’t excuse the fact that our volunteers were overzealous and may have put signs in places they weren’t supposed to.”

Of course, Wilson isn’t the only offender. In just the last few days, we’ve seen signs for a host of Republican candidates: Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, Attorney General Henry McMaster, Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom and a host of statewide candidates that lost in the June elections Bill Connor, Kelly, Elizabeth Moffly and Leighton Lord. And those are just the names we’ve seen in the last week in limited driving around the state. 

While we have seen hardly any signs for Democratic candidates, maybe that’s just because there weren’t too many Democratic primary candidates – or because some (Alvin Greene?) didn’t campaign much at all. 

Regardless, we’ve been struck this year by the apparent concerted effort by Republicans to blanket exit ramps along interstates. Not only is it dangerous for workers to scurry around in the middle of the night erecting these signs, but it is visual clutter. 

One senior state employee told us that Republican campaign consultants reportedly encouraged campaigns as a stealthy tactic to put signs at exit ramps – particularly on Thursday nights. (Piper stressed there was no such directive in the Wilson campaign.)

And why on Thursday nights? Because it’s common knowledge that highway road crews generally work a four-day week and if signs are placed on Thursday night, they’ll be visible for at least three full day before there’s a real chance they’ll be taken down. 

And with lots of recent state budget cuts, it’s clear the Highway Department is doing less and less to remove the annoying campaign signs. 

So now that we’ve got a three or four month hiatus from crazy campaign sign world, it seems like it is time for someone – perhaps the current attorney general whose signs are also littering state byways – to send a message to candidates: Pick up your signs or  face prosecution.

To Statehouse Report:

Mr. Davis hardly overstated the case ("Teaching the Teachers," 25 June 2010); the question remains how much he understated it. These cases affect not only particular students and particular educators but also entire classes, entire schools, entire districts, entire families, entire communities. The fact that a few dozen teachers have been duly relieved of classroom responsibilities limits consideration of the social and pedagogical damages.

Mr. Rex bemoans what he has not been able to accomplish given the budget shortfalls he has been facing. Alternatively, his administrative failures explain the continuous rates of sexual predation throughout his term; the rate of adjudicating ODAs--one case every three weeks--is exactly as high now as it was in early 2007, which means that no program/policy has been implemented to reduce the rate of adjudication, much less the actual rate of incidence, which remains unknown.

Mr. Rex's successor can expect to face only more acute budget shortfalls over the next four years. If your coverage is to be believed, nothing more will be done in the next four years than has occurred over the past four years, and in fact, we have every reason to expect that even less will be done.

-- Edward B. Roberts, Latta, SC

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Voter ID.  Thumbs up that obsessed legislators will have to wait another year before messing with the peoples’ ability to vote, as the voter ID bill died when neither the House nor the Senate would compromise this week in an extended sine die session.