S.C. May Lift Election Day Liquor Ban

South Carolina’s Election Day liquor law, the last blanket ban in the country, could finally go the way of bathtub gin and the Anti-Saloon League. On Wednesday evening, the South Carolina Senate, following the lead of the lower house, approved a bill to rescind the ban. If the bill is signed by the Republican governor, Nikki R. Haley, South Carolina will join six other states that have rescinded similar laws since 2008, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, an industry group.

That would leave only Alaska and Massachusetts with Election Day alcohol bans, the council noted, although in these states, local governments may choose to be exempt from the prohibition. And it is another step in the nation’s long, slow coming to terms with demon rum and other once-maligned spirits.

Election Day alcohol bans were common throughout the United States in decades past, when politicians’ promises of free drinks played an essential role in many a get-out-the-vote strategy. South Carolina is a state known as much for its political chicanery as it is for its deeply held religious sentiment, and the fear that a crooked politician might buy votes with free drinks is the reason the state government here has clung to its ban for so long. But in the age of the robocall and the “super PAC,” the alarm over the possibility of a ham-handed votes-for-drinks scheme has come to seem downright quaint.

State Representative Bakari T. Sellers, a Democrat who favored overturning the ban, said he was among those exasperated to be wasting 21st-century time on a debate that seems more suited for the age of Woodrow Wilson. “It’s 2014, dude,” he said.

The ban did have its modern-day supporters, however. J. Todd Rutherford, a Democratic state representative who co-sponsored the House bill, said he had introduced similar legislation in previous years, only to have it scuttled by conservative lawmakers.

Mike Burns, a Republican state representative from Travelers Rest, S.C., was one of 20 legislators who voted against a bill in April that proposed lifting the ban. He said that he and the others were “making a statement” about the steady erosion, nationwide, of the state and local “blue laws” that once strictly limited the sale of alcohol for religious reasons.

The Distilled Spirits Council noted that since 2002, 16 states had rescinded bans on the Sunday sale of hard liquor, in whole or in part, with 38 states now allowing it.

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