How to Get the South Carolina Voter File: Who Can Buy It, and What It Costs

The South Carolina State Election Commission sells voter lists to one kind of buyer. That buyer is a registered South Carolina voter. That eligibility rule is the gate — and it is the first thing to settle, because it decides who on the campaign places the order. Everything past it is easy by comparison: the order runs through a web portal, the file downloads, and the price follows the geography you select — a per-record scale for most lists, flat fees for legislative districts. A school-district campaign and a statewide campaign use the same steps and pay very different amounts.

The buyer has to be a registered South Carolina voter — verify that before you plan around it

State law directs the Election Commission's executive director to "furnish at reasonable price any precinct lists to a qualified elector requesting them" (S.C. Code § 7-3-20(D)(13)). A qualified elector is defined at § 7-1-20(14) as a person whose name is on the active roster of voters and who holds a valid registration certificate — a person, not a company and not a committee.

The Commission restates it in one line on its list-sales page: "You must be a registered South Carolina voter to purchase a list." Ordering runs through a MySCVotes sign-in — the state's voter portal — which asks you to enter your personal information as it appears on your voter registration card before the order flow opens.

Most campaigns handle this without drama: the candidate is ordinarily a registered voter, and so is any staffer or volunteer who lives in the state. But the requirement is the registration itself, not the role — don't assume anyone qualifies. Before you build the purchase around a person, have them confirm their own registration with their county board or through the state's voter portal, and keep that person available for follow-up questions about the order. Two things follow:

• The order attaches to a person's voter registration, not to the campaign.
• No vendor, consultancy, or software company can place the order for you. Activate's South Carolina voter file page records the same thing: the campaign buys, the campaign uploads.

Scope your geography first, and confirm district boundaries before you buy

The price of the list is set by its record count. The record count is set by the geography you scope — so geography comes first, and one check belongs inside it.

The Commission attaches a standing caution to any voting district below county-council level. Before purchasing lists for school, municipal, special purpose, fire, or similar districts, it instructs purchasers to confirm with that county's board of voter registration and elections whether there are any pending updates affecting that district. The check is worth making first, because a boundary update after you buy means re-buying. The sequence:

Orders are placed at the Commission's saleable-data portal. Lists can be built on any combination of county; voting district — state House, state Senate, congressional, county council, city council, school district, and others; age; sex; race; household; participation in a particular election; and date of registration. The portal also links a custom data request for anything it does not offer online.

The fee is a sliding scale, so run your geography through it

South Carolina publishes a per-record schedule for electronic lists, in effect since March 1, 2022:

Three district types carry a flat fee instead: a State House district is $160, a State Senate district is $300, and a US House district is $1,200. Mailing labels and printed reports are priced on their own line — $75 for the first 1,000 to 5,000 records, then $15 for each additional 1,000 or fraction.

Run your own geography through the scale before it reaches a budget line. The Commission publishes registration counts nightly, by county, so the inputs are public:

• The August 31, 2026 report puts the state at 3,417,405 registered voters. That count sits deep inside the top band, so a statewide order hits the $2,500 cap.
• York County, in the same report, sits at 191,740 registered voters. That is 116,740 records past 75,000 — five 25,000-record bands once the fraction rounds up — so $275 plus $75 × 5, or $650.
• A school-district-sized list of roughly 40,000 records computes to $25 plus $1 × 175, or about $200. Any list between 50,001 and 75,000 records is the flat $275.

Those three amounts are the published formula applied to published counts on one dated report; registration counts move nightly, and the portal computes the binding price when you place the order. Two useful conclusions survive the rounding. The statewide cap is genuinely good value when you want the whole state, since buying all 7 US House districts separately would run $8,400. And a local race rarely needs to find $2,500 — a town or school-district list is a couple of hundred dollars, a smaller line than most campaigns expect.

What arrives, and the one-step prep before upload

The electronic file includes name, address, race, gender, date of birth, voter registration number and date registered, county, precinct, voting districts, and voter participation history for the past two statewide primaries and general elections. The format is a comma-separated .txt, delivered by electronic download, or on a flash drive or DVD by pickup or mail. Note what is not in it: no phone numbers and no email addresses, anywhere.

Two notes on the day it lands. First, the .txt extension: the upload picker in Activate accepts .csv, .xlsx, and .xls, so rename the delivered file from .txt to .csv before uploading — the contents are unchanged, and no spreadsheet round-trip is needed. The importer detects the delimiter rather than assuming commas, strips the byte-order mark, and reads the UTF-16 exports some state systems still produce. Every value is kept as text, so a long voter registration number arrives intact rather than as a truncated number.

The second note is about what you carry forward. Date of birth, race, and gender are in the file because the state records them; none of them needs to be on a volunteer's screen at a door. At the mapping step you choose which columns become canvasser-facing fields — leave those unmapped and they never reach a volunteer. They stay only in the preserved copy of your own file, which is what the export hands back. The voter list readiness checklist walks through which fields to keep.

The use restriction is narrower than "no commercial use" sounds

The notice on the Commission's page is the one S.C. Code § 30-2-50(B) requires every state agency and local government to give records requestors: obtaining or using public records for commercial solicitation directed to any person in this State is prohibited. Violating § 30-2-50(A) knowingly is a misdemeanor carrying a fine up to $500, up to a year, or both.

The definition that governs it is narrower than the summary. § 30-2-30(3) defines commercial solicitation as contact "for the purpose of selling or marketing a consumer product or service," and then excludes, in as many words, "contacting persons for political purposes using information on file with state or local voter registration offices."

Canvassing, phoning, and mailing from a purchased South Carolina list is the activity that exclusion describes. What § 30-2-50 does reach is pointing those records at a product or a service, which is the boundary to hold: the list is for the campaign's own voter contact and nothing else.

The Commission's page, the statute, and the portal's public pages carry no signed affidavit, no sworn use certification, and no licensing agreement. The click-through steps of the order flow are only visible from inside an account, so treat a mid-order certification as possible and ask about it.

Turnaround is unpublished, so settle it before you plan a calendar

The Commission publishes no processing time. The portal does have a public order-status lookup — confirmation number and email address — so once an order is placed you can watch it there. Electronic delivery suggests a standard order may be quick, and that is a suggestion, not a commitment. Plan the first canvass around a confirmed date rather than an assumed one.

The page invites first-time purchasers to call (803) 734-9060 or write [email protected] for help placing a first order. Ask three things while you have them:

• The current turnaround.
• Whether anything has to be certified partway through the order.
• Whether the district boundaries you are about to buy are current.

Turning a purchased file into a field program

Once the file is on a laptop, the remaining work is import and turf. The import lives in the campaign's settings: upload the file, review the mapping, preview, then confirm. Mapping columns by hand is free; preparing a new file shape carries a small processing charge — the same shape is reused free for 7 days. Because the state's file carries no phone numbers or email addresses, the preview will show you that phone and email reach are zero before anything commits — worth knowing at that moment rather than after.

Activate does not sell voter data. Campaigns bring their own list, and it stays private — encrypted at rest, never sold or shared. The first 5,000 records in an import are stored free; a larger file is quoted before anything commits. Your field program is free; optional data and SMS use Credits, and you see the cost before you confirm.

South Carolina's gate is a person, not a price. Name the registered voter who will place the order and confirm they are registered, scope the list to the ground you will actually knock, check district boundaries with the county if your race sits below county level, and the state's own scale keeps a local file in the low hundreds. From there, the 30-minute launch sequence picks up once your list is imported.

Sources

• South Carolina State Election Commission, "Sale of Voter Registration Lists" — fee schedule, eligibility, selection criteria, file contents, and the boundary-update caution.
• South Carolina State Election Commission, "Voter Registration and Participation Statistics" — nightly registration totals by county; August 31, 2026 report (statewide 3,417,405; York County 191,740).
• South Carolina State Election Commission saleable-data portal — vrems.scvotes.sc.gov/SaleableData.
• S.C. Code § 7-3-20(D)(13) — who may be furnished a list — and § 7-1-20(14) — what a qualified elector is.
• S.C. Code §§ 30-2-30(3) and 30-2-50 — commercial solicitation, its political-purposes exclusion, and the penalty.