Lindsey Graham

If Lindsey Graham had died before filing closed on March 30, the primary and general election would have gone off as scheduled, no interruption. Since several challengers also filed, the same would have been true if he had died the day before the June primary, although I suspect that, in the latter case, a high-profile Republican would have launched an independent bid.

But because he died on July 11 as the Republican Party nominee, we’re having the quickest election South Carolina law provides for.

And when I say quickest, I don’t mean by a few days. Normally, when someone dies in office, the primary is about 11 weeks later, and the general election is held on the 20th Tuesday. (Those numbers vary under a new law that consolidates special elections to about once a quarter.)

In fact, if the deceased incumbent held any office other than U.S. senator, we’d have a truly illuminating illustration of how rushed the primary do-over is, because we’d have a special election to finish out the current term alongside the special election to pick a replacement nominee for the November ballot. And the replacement nominee for the full term would be selected nearly two months before the nominees to complete the current term. We miss that illustration because the governor picks a temporary replacement when a U.S. senator dies in office.

European model

Europeans are used to this sort of thing, even though our election is rushed even by parliamentary standards; of course, European voters are mostly picking a party rather than a candidate — you know, like most Americans now do in our general elections.

Our condensed timeline for a new nominee puts S.C. voters at a huge disadvantage: Does anyone really have the time to learn enough about all 10 candidates — or even just the five the Republican Party considered important enough to include in its debate — to make a wise decision? Particularly when the presumptive favorite is someone we know practically nothing about?

Darline Graham might turn out to be the best U.S. senator South Carolina has ever had. Or the worst. Unlike former Gov. Mark Sanford and U.S. Reps. Russell Fry and Ralph Norman, we simply won’t have enough information to know that by Tuesday. We certainly won't have the sort of information we can only get by seeing someone in action, repeatedly.

A week ago, I ran a piece from a regular columnist that made that very point. It was critical of Sen. Graham, so it’s something I normally wouldn’t have published less than a week before early voting started but I wouldn’t have hesitated to run just days after filing closed. Here those timelines run concurrently.

In another month, we still wouldn’t have enough information about Sen. Graham; but we’d have exponentially more than we do today.

There’s nothing to be done now except hope that whatever decision we make turns out to be the best one; after all, we can’t know for sure how Mr. Sanford or Mr. Fry or Mr. Norman would perform in the Senate either.

But while I hope we never again find ourselves suddenly having to pick a new person to serve in one of the most important positions South Carolinians ever elect, it’s not impossible. We could go a century without a U.S. senator dying right after being nominated for another term, or it could happen in the next election cycle.

A better way?

Is a one-month election window really the best option if that happens?

For Sen. Chip Campsen, the Legislature’s top expert on election law, the answer is unequivocally yes. “The options,” he tells me, “are the people, the party and the governor. I don’t think you really want the governor or the party picking the nominee.”

Well, no. Certainly not. And I agree that in some cases, those truly are the only alternatives we could consider. In some cases, though, we could create a longer campaign period.

Federal law requires all states to set their general election ballots at least 45 days before the November election, so there’s time to send absentee ballots to voters serving overseas in the military and for those voters to return them. Since it takes several days after the primary or runoff to get everything certified and ballots printed, Sen. Campsen suggests a more realistic deadline for the vote is 60 days out — or the first week of September.

That means if a nominee died in June, there would be plenty of time to hold a two-month do-over primary, which would double our window to get to know the candidates.

The one-month primary law was passed in 1991, well before the federal law was passed. That period seems to have been picked for simplicity and consistency; it follows roughly the same timeline as the older law that did leave picking a new nominee to the parties. Both laws say that if the results of the do-over primary aren’t certified until two weeks before the general election, the general election gets pushed into December

Maybe giving ourselves an extra month isn’t worth the trouble, given how infrequently a condensed do-over would matter much and how few South Carolinians even bother to vote in the primaries. (Yes, that’s another nudge to go to the polls on Tuesday.) After all, any effort to change one little part of our election law inevitably attracts hangers-on, who want to add their favorite election law changes, and all those efforts to mess around with the law can introduce major mistakes.

But don’t we at least need to talk about it? And don’t we need to start that conversation before Tuesday? Before a reasonable question about how our laws should work gets dismissed as sour grapes over who won this nomination?

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