Raymond "Usie" Richards' impending lawsuit against the Board of Elections challenging the counting of absentee ballots from the November elections has hit a major obstacle.
Richards said Tuesday that attempts by he and his attorney, Stylish Willis, to obtain transcripts of the Legislature's discussion of the Election Reform Act of 1984 (Act 4934) and its subsequent amendment, Act 5367, had been fruitless.
According to Richards, both the present and past chief archivists of the Legislature, Sen. Donald "Ducks" Cole and Colette White-Amaro, confirmed that the legislative history of bills from the 15th to the 17th Legislature were lost in Hurricane Hugo of 1989. Richards had hoped to introduce the documents as evidence that Acts 4934 and 5367 were intended to keep in place the law that existed from 1963 to 1984 laying out the criteria for determining a valid or invalid ballot.
Richards said the absence of the legislative history on these acts would make it difficult to clearly prove the legislative intent on dealing with Section 623 of the election laws. Richards and Willis agreed that the Legislature must now define what criteria should be used by the Board of Elections in reviewing and tabulating absentee ballots, which are paper ballots.
