South Carolina

Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, and circuit judges are elected by joint vote of the General Assembly after commission screening — they never appear on a public ballot. Judicial-race models expecting partisan or retention contests find nothing, while seat inventories that skip legislature-elected judgeships undercount the bench. The only voter-elected judges are county probate judges.

The statewide results site carries only federal and state contests — county offices live exclusively in 46 per-county sub-feeds, each with its own election ID and a version number that changes on every update. Scrape the state rollup and you'll never see a probate judge or a fire commissioner. And municipal elections aren't reliably there at all — the state's own site says to check locally.

Primaries require a majority; the runoff is exactly fourteen days later as its own election with its own feed — and early voting for it lasts two days. Runoff absentee ballots are the primary's ballots with eliminated names struck through. Primaries certify statewide two days after election day. A monthly harvest cadence misses entire elections here.

South Carolina registers voters without party. Primary choice happens at the poll table with an oath, party identity exists only as participation history, and the runoff locks you to the party you picked two weeks earlier — though voters who skipped the primary may join. Voter-file pipelines expecting a party field get nothing.

Sheriffs, clerks of court, and coroners elect in presidential years; probate judges, auditors, treasurers, and solicitors ride the midterm. Half the courthouse is always absent from any given cycle, and inferring seat expirations from one observed election misdates the other half by two years.

One of the last states with a straight-ticket option, presented before any contest — and the results files report STRAIGHT PARTY as if it were an office, with vote totals. Schemas without the concept parse a ballot mechanic as a race, and nonpartisan-contest rolloff looks like an anomaly when it's the rule working as designed.

Before the 2022 early-voting law, absentee votes appeared as county-lump pseudo-precincts — rows named "Absentee 1" through "Absentee 5" with no geography. From 2022 on, every real precinct carries six vote-type columns instead. One parser cannot read both eras; longitudinal precinct analysis double-counts or orphans the pseudo-rows.

School districts cross county lines — Anderson District 2's trustee races appear inside Greenville County's results feed — while hundreds of pre-1975 special purpose districts elect fire, water, and watershed commissioners on November ballots under names no national taxonomy holds. County-keyed matching assigns seats to the wrong government, twice.