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

If you have been marked inactive or need to update your registration, don’t panic! Follow the instructions onscreen to update your registration information, or contact your county’s voter registration office to make the update. Inactive voters remain eligible to vote and in most cases can reactivate their registration by updating their information or by voting.

At the Polls: When you go to a polling place, a poll worker will ask you to confirm your address. If you remain at the same address where you registered and are eligible to vote, you can cast a ballot by the normal process. Casting your vote will mark you as “active” again on the voter rolls.

If you have moved, depending on whether you moved inside or outside the precinct, a poll worker may ask you to either complete a change of address form or cast a failsafe provisional ballot. If you moved to another county but did not update your voter registration before the 30-day deadline for this election, you are not eligible to vote. State law requires you to be registered prior to the deadline to be eligible to vote.

For more information about address changes and voter registration, see the Frequently Asked Questions on the State Election Commission website.

The deadline to register as a voter for the 2026 General Election is Oct. 5. If you submit a new registration after this deadline, you will not be able to vote in this year’s General Election, but you can vote in other elections going forward. For more information about future elections, visit our Voting Information Center.

South Carolina’s population is growing, but our voter rolls are shrinking. Despite leading the country in its rate of population growth, South Carolina had 51,891 fewer registered voters in 2025 than in 2022.

State election officials maintain voter rolls on a regular basis by marking voters as inactive. The state sends a confirmation card in the mail that you must return within 90 days to confirm your registration information is correct. If you do not respond to the mail, do not update your voter registration information, and do not vote in the following two General Election cycles, you can 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.

Remember: Inactive voters remain eligible to vote and can reactivate their registration by voting or updating their information at scvotes.gov.

Shrinking voter rolls 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. Help spread the word in your community 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.