The Resolution of Election Disputes: Legal Principles that Control Election Challenges Under George, seemingly technical requirements can be found to be mandatory after an election if either: 1. the provisions substantially affect 2. there is a total disregard of the statute. • • • • the free and intelligent casting of a vote, the determination of the results, an essential element of the election, or the fundamental integrity of the election. The South Carolina Supreme Court reviewed the long history of ballot secrecy requirements in the South Carolina Constitution and statutes, and the salutary goals that secrecy of the ballot achieves. It then turned to judicial decisions in South Carolina cases involving the secrecy of the ballot and found cases dealing with varying degrees of breached ballot secrecy but said that it found no case where voters were not provided with any voting booths at all. Further, the supreme court found that other state courts that had considered the same issue disagreed on how to resolve it. In the end, after saying it could understand the municipal election commission’s decision to hold the balloting without voting booths, the South Carolina Supreme Court concluded that the commission’s decision was wrong. We conclude this election challenge is not one in which we are faced with minor violations of technical requirements. The history of the secret ballot, our precedent, and the statutes persuade us that the voting booth is an essential element of the electoral process. The lack of any evidence of voter intimidation or fraud is not dispositive because the total absence of booths affects the fundamental integrity of the election…We cannot condone the method of voting employed by Commission [sic] because it would unwisely sanction a practice that “circumvents[s] the plain purposes of the law and open[s] the door to fraud” and intimidation… At 211 (emphasis supplied). The court came to the same conclusion about the inability to fold the punch cards. We hold that the use of ballots that were not designed to be folded violates the constitutional and statutory right to a secret ballot. We do so for the same reasons expressed in connection with the absence of the voting booth. The provision for foldable ballots is mandatory because it affects an essential element of the election and the fundamental integrity of the electoral process. At 212 (emphasis supplied). As insistent as the South Carolina Supreme Court was in George that the ballot secrecy was mandatory because it was an essential element of the election process, it reached a different result in Taylor v. Town of Atlantic Beach Election Commission, 609 S.E.2d 500 (2005). This is one of the two Taylor cases discussed in Chapter 1 to show that there is no common law basis for election challenges. To recap briefly, Charlene Taylor lost badly in her attempt to be mayor of Atlantic Beach, South Carolina. Ms. Taylor came in third out of four candidates. The winning candidate got 104 votes and the other three candidates got, respec- 72