SC’s only contested election still has no resolve. What’s going on with Atlantic Beach?

The town’s new lawyer said law enforcement officers were investigating the fraudulent votes.

But, according to SLED spokeswoman Renée Wunderlich, the agency does not have an investigation related to Atlantic Beach’s election.

After the contested election last fall, in 2023, the town of Atlantic Beach met again on Monday afternoon to try and decipher who their official mayor is and where to go in the future.

The city’s new election lawyer from Charleston, Dwayne Green from the Pflung Law Firm, said that since their last public meeting, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division has opened an investigation into the election.

Green was contacted about his statements about the alleged SLED investigation at Monday’s meeting, but has not yet responded.

After less than 45 minutes of a presentation from Green, the meeting ended with no resolve as to who their mayor is or who won the town council seats.

The meeting was scheduled for three hours, and the agenda focused on reviewing the election challenge process, mayoral race updates, lawsuit updates and correspondence from Shawn Swinson.

Swinson ran for an open town council seat last year.

Following starting his political campaign, Swinson was discovered to have spent years in federal prison in Virginia for drug charges and money laundering and was accused by his landlord of owing $11,420 in unpaid rent.

“You’re taking my livelihood, you’re taking my investment. You’re taking everything I’ve worked for, and what am I supposed to do then,” Swinson told The Sun News on Oct. 12, 2023. “That’s not what I came here for, I came here to establish myself.”

Green said once the SLED investigation is complete, that will dictate where the commission goes from there. He also said that it would be “premature” for them to make a decision before they have all the evidence, including the findings of the investigation.

“Because the same voters are being challenged in both cases, then that’s absolutely material,” he said at Monday’s meeting.

That meeting is not the first that the town has held since the mayoral race last year.

Earlier this spring, the town held a special meeting about the race that lasted for five hours. At the end, they decided to hold a special election for mayor to determine the final results.

This turmoil comes after last November, when trying to recount and certify 18 challenged votes, Atlantic Beach Mayor Jake Evans fired the entire election commission, which then left the town unable to authenticate its own election results.

That action led to one mayoral candidate John David Jr. filing a lawsuit against the town with the South Carolina Supreme Court over the dissolution of the election commission, according to previous reporting .

When a Sun News reporter called Josephine Isom, the other mayoral candidate and current councilwoman, seeking comment about the matter on Jan. 11, Isom said, “Girl, get off my phone,” and then hung up.

The town’s letter to the South Carolina Governor’s Office asked the state to take over the administration of the municipal election.

The letter cited reasons such as “allegations of voter fraud, alleged illegal and improper conduct by a municipal election official, and various legal actions that are now pending before the Supreme Court of South Carolina.”

Thomas Limehouse Jr., chief legal counsel for the governor’s office, wrote in a Jan. 10 response reviewed by The Sun News that “the Office cannot accommodate your request for Governor McMaster to end this embarrassing episode. . . by resorting to a procedure that is not authorized by state law.”

Following Limehouse’s correspondence, the state decided that Horry County would oversee the municipality’s future elections.

This is not the first time Atlantic Beach has struggled to determine the results of a municipal election on its own. The Sun News reported that between 2005 and 2011, the South Carolina Supreme Court had to step in for an election dispute three times.