Protect Your Vote. Check Your Registration.

Before you vote, visit scvotes.gov to make sure your voter registration is up to date and you know where your polling place is. It’s especially important to check your registration if you:

• recently moved
• have not voted in the last four years
• don’t have easy access to the mail

The deadline to register as a voter for the 2026 General Election is Oct. 5. If you are already registered to vote but need to update your registration, don’t panic! You can update your voter registration by contacting your county’s voter registration office or visiting the State Election Commission website.

South Carolina’s population is growing, but our voter rolls are shrinking. Voter roll removals have outpaced new voter registrations, and South Carolina election officials reported there were 51,891 fewer registered voters in the state in 2025 than there were in 2022.

State election officials maintain voter rolls on a regular basis by removing the registrations of people the state believes to have died, moved away, or become ineligible to vote. In South Carolina, the state marks voters as inactive if they go several elections without voting and sends them a confirmation card in the mail that must be returned within 90 days to confirm their registration information is correct. If voters do not respond to the mail and do not update their voter registration information, they can later be removed from the voter rolls.

The top reasons for voters being marked inactive include moving within a county, moving out of a county, and failing to respond to a confirmation card mailed by the state.

Voter roll removals do not affect all South Carolinians equally. Even as communities of color grew in South Carolina since 2022, the number of registered voters from those communities fell. Counties with large non-white* populations saw larger declines in total registered voters than the state as a whole.

South Carolinians already stopped an electoral redistricting attempt in May 2026 that would have diluted Black voting power. Now we can help ensure that our votes and our neighbors’ votes are counted. Help spread the word and encourage people in your community to check their registration status today at scvotes.gov.

Once you have checked your own registration status, let your family, neighbors, and friends know. We have social media graphics, printable handouts, and a full statistical analysis available in our Protect Your Vote Toolkit. Help spread the word in your community throughout the month of September with a simple message:

Protect Your Vote. Check Your Registration.

* We recognize that “non-white” is an imprecise term and does not reflect the identities of voters. In this statistical analysis, we use it as a term to include people the state identified as Asian, Hispanic, Black / African American, or Native American.