Partway through the Kamala Harris town hall in Rock Hill, Ri Estes had a question about voting rights.
The 42-year-old wasn't nervous to talk to a presidential candidate. More than anything, she felt prepared.
Wrapping her left hand around the microphone, Estes introduced herself as an American Civil Liberties Union Rights for All voter and asked Harris to share her thoughts on restoring voting rights to those who are currently incarcerated.
The crowd clapped, Harris launched into a two-minute answer and the work of a multimillion-dollar campaign to inject civil liberties issues into the 2020 campaign was underway.
The effort created by the ACLU is focused on getting candidates talking about civil liberties issues like voting rights, reproductive rights, criminal justice reform and immigration.
As an early presidential primary state, South Carolina is key to the group's national strategy.
They also want to get the answers on-camera.
While Estes asked her question, Andrew Russell was recording the April 19 interaction on his cellphone, panning his device in one fluid swoop from Estes to Harris to capture the whole exchange.
When the town hall ended, Russell sent the footage to Maxwell Frost, a national organizing specialist working for the ACLU in South Carolina.
"If we keep asking these same questions of the candidates, they are going to have to find a way to answer them," Estes told The Post and Courier. "As soon as we say we are a Rights for All volunteer or a Rights for All voter, they know what's coming."
The national effort, which launched in March, is placing a strong emphasis on the four early presidential primary states where candidates are most likely to be campaigning as they seek their party's nomination. That means Rights for All volunteers are becoming staples at campaign events in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.
So far, the ACLU has uploaded at least 18 videos that show ten presidential candidates giving answers to Rights for All volunteers in the Palmetto State.
Already, the group is seeing some success in some of its questions gaining national attention.
It was an ACLU Rights for All voter in Iowa who first asked U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, whether prisoners should be allowed to vote.
The ACLU has allocated an estimated $30 million for electoral efforts during this 2020 election cycle, and the group confirmed most of those dollars are going toward the Rights for All campaign.
In South Carolina, Frost said the state chapter of the ACLU has trained an estimated 300 volunteers, along with nine team leaders.
The push comes at a time when interest in civil liberties issues is growing. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the number of civil rights and civil liberties lobbyists has been steadily increasing since President Donald Trump took office.
"There are so many people who are deeply concerned about what's happening in civil liberties and civil rights. I think it's important that we use our creative energy to do this work that's really important," said Susan Dunn, the legal director and interim executive director of the state's ACLU chapter.
Though Democratic presidential candidates are the ones campaigning right now, Frost said the goal of the nonpartisan push is to get all 2020 candidates on the record, including Trump.
Estes, an Army veteran who is pursuing her master's degree at Winthrop University, said she is committed to questioning all candidates.
"It's important to stay involved in the political process. A democracy doesn't work without people engaging," she said.
The goal, Frost continued, is to urge all presidential candidates to think about these issues so that they will be ready to put policy into place when elected.
"What we've seen is when candidates are dodging questions, we've seen by the fifth or sixth time they are asked the same question, they aren't dodging anymore," Frost said.