Mac Deford, Democratic candidate for Congress in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, released the following statement in response to Gov. Henry McMaster’s announcement that he will call the General Assembly back into special session for congressional redistricting:
"The South Carolina Senate voted, the democratic process produced an answer, and Governor McMaster ignored it.
"Rather than honor that result, he has capitulated to demands from a White House that cannot achieve through elections what it now seeks to accomplish through a special session: the redrawing of maps, the erasure of a majority-Black district, and the cancellation of thousands of absentee ballots already cast by real South Carolinians, including the men and women who wear this nation's uniform.
"Those votes will not be thrown out because they were cast in error, or because any law requires it, but because politicians in Washington have decided that certain voters hold too much power and they need a map that corrects that problem.
"The Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act, Tennessee has already moved to exploit it, and now our governor has chosen to follow. He has done so not because the law of South Carolina demands it, not because the people of this state have called for it, but because a coordinated national effort to diminish Black voting power has found in Henry McMaster a willing instrument.
"I have served the Lowcountry for nearly two decades, first in uniform defending our ports and waterways in the U.S. Coast Guard, and then as an attorney in local government fighting for the families, individuals, and communities that make this place worth defending. I know what it looks like when people are failed by the institutions built to serve them. And I know the difference between a government that works for its citizens and a political machine that works to choose them.
"The people of South Carolina's First District deserve a congressman who will stand against that machine, not only in election years but on every vote, in every session, against every effort to engineer away the voices of the people he was sent to represent.
"I will fight for a federal ban on gerrymandering, because what is unfolding in Columbia today is precisely the corrupt and anti-democratic machinery that Washington has enabled and protected for far too long. I am in this fight. I have been in this fight. And no map handed down from Trump’s White House or rushed through Columbia will change that. I am committed to running in South Carolina’s First District, no matter what they do."