Chapter 3 On appeal, Mr. Knight argued that despite the general rule about technical irregularities, absentee balloting procedures should be subject to strict scrutiny. The supreme court disagreed, saying, Petitioner’s argument for a strict scrutiny standard for absentee voting must fail because our General Assembly has specified that statutes concerning absentee registration and absentee voting shall be liberally construed. At 686. Accordingly, the supreme court decided that the State Board of Canvassers’ decision affirming the absentee ballot count did not constitute an error of law, even though the counting procedure did not meet all the technical absentee ballot requirements. As was true of the other cases discussed in this chapter, the South Carolina Supreme Court stressed that the interrupted absentee ballot count did not affect the result of the election and that the absentee ballots were secure and had not been tampered with. E.3. Candidate Qualification Procedures: Irregularities in candidate nominating procedures will not void a candidate’s election We mentioned earlier that the question of whether words in a statute regulating the actions of election officials are to be read as mandatory or directory depends in large part on whether or not the irregularity still can be corrected. We also mentioned that courts follow the liberal construction of election statutes, which makes them directory “after an election” even if they were mandatory “before the election,” in order to do equity in situations where things go wrong and nobody is really to blame. That is what happened in Tate v. Morley, 153 S.E.2d 437 (Ga. 1967), when Dr. Horace E. Tate ran for a seat on the Atlanta, Georgia, Board of Education. He won in the primary election and was elected in the general election. But Robert S. Morley, as a citizen and a taxpayer, sued to remove Dr. Tate from the school board because Dr. Tate was allowed to qualify as a candidate in the primary election without paying the required qualifying fee and after the time for qualifying had passed. In fact, Mr. Morley was correct, after a fashion. Dr. Tate was allowed on the ballot for the primary election without paying a fee only because the committee that administered the Atlanta primary election followed a ruling by a state court in another case, on August 17, 1965, that rejected the requirement for paying filing fees. On September 8, 1965, Dr. Tate was permitted to qualify as a candidate for school board. He won the primary and, in December 1965, he won the general election. But on January 11, 1966, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s ruling in the case on which the Atlanta committee relied to let Dr. Tate get on the primary election ballot without paying a filing fee. Then Mr. Morley brought his lawsuit and, because the supreme court’s reversal of the other case removed the legal basis for allowing Dr. Tate on the ballot for the primary election, the lower court in this case removed Dr. Tate from office. He appealed to the supreme court. The Georgia Supreme Court began by noting that Mr. Morley did not attack Dr. Tate’s qualifications to be on the school board or the way the general election was conducted. Then, faced with a qualified candidate who had been elected to office, the supreme court said, …It is firmly established that objections to irregularities in the nomination of a candidate should be taken prior to election and it is too late to object after the nominee’s name has been placed on the ballot and he has been elected to office; his election cannot be impeached on the ground that statutory requirements regarding nominations were not complied with in his case or that his nomination was procured by unlawful means. 69