This story saddened us a lot here at the ZRC, and I struggled with how to respond. It’s not every day that prominent politicians come out and explicitly state their intention to deny an entire community of American citizens their basic rights after all.

Yet that is precisely what we’ve seen this week from South Carolina:

But to hear some Republican officials tell it, you’d think that on Election Day in South Carolina, graveyards all across the state empty out and hordes of zombie voters lurch to the polls.

But dead people can’t vote. They’re dead.

…

Before the hearing, Horry County GOP Rep. Alan Clemmons, who led the hearing, said, “We must have certainty in South Carolina that zombies aren’t voting.”

Absolutely unbelievable, isn’t it?

Some background here: recently in South Carolina there’s been heated debate over a Voter ID measure which, similarly to the Wisconsin measure the ZRC opposed early in 2011, could be expected to pose an undue hardship upon the Differently Animated population. However, *unlike* in Wisconsin, voter-related laws in the Deep South have to be approved by the Feds because of federal civil rights legislation, so the bill is apparently on hold as of now.

Thus the bill’s supporters have been holding hearings about the ‘menace’ posed by voter fraud (which largely doesn’t exist according to the academic research), and at those hearings they’ve let slip one of the real reasons behind the proposed law: to stop the Undead from participating in the democratic process. Hence the above quote from Living Supremacist Rep. Alan Clemmons, who is unafraid to wear his Anti-Zombie prejudice on his sleeve.

The bill’s supporters have even got a list, allegedly of the names of ‘dead’ people who are voting, and in true McCarthyist fashion they’re going around touting the list to spread fear; fear of Zombies. The problem for the bill’s backers is that most of the people on the list aren’t dead OR undead, but alive, and on said list erroneously:

The reliability of that data, however, came into question today during another hearing on the issue where State Election Commission director Marci Andino testified that some of the voters the DMV data said were dead are very much alive – and were eligible to cast a ballot.

So in South Carolina we currently have a situation where the state Republicans, pushing a Voter ID bill, use the spectre of Zombies voting (as if that would be a bad thing!) to scare up support, and their Democratic rivals try to prove that the Zombies aren’t actually Undead, rather than defend the right of the Undead to vote in the first place.

It’s an ugly situation all around. Literally no one is speaking up for the rights of the Undead in South Carolina.

Times like these I wonder about the need for a Zombie political part to complement our work here at the ZRC.

We’ll keep you posted on this outrageous story as it develops.

Tags: Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, January 28th, 2012 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.