A voter in Kingstree, S.C., votes in this photo on whether to change Williamsburg County‘s form of government from a council-supervisor type in which an elected official “runs” the county to a council-administrator form in which a professional manager is hired by the local council to run things.
Retired local editor Linda W. Brown says she thought the referendum failed by a 2-1 margin because of voters’ fears that the new form would erode voting rights, which were reduced when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key part of the federal Voting Rights Act earlier this summer.
Across the South, voters tend to participate in elections much like the rest of the nation. In the 2012 presidential election, for example, 58.2 percent of eligible voters cast ballots nationally. More than 60 percent of voters in four Southern states (Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and Virginia) cast ballots, while three others exceeded the national average (Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi.) Only Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee were below the national average, but all were above 50 percent, according to a George Mason University study.