DOJ Sues Alabama For Rolling Tide Of Legal Voter Registrations Into The Garbage
Every day, new attempted GOP fuckery!
Welcome to the Department of Election Fuckery! Today we go to Alabama, where state Secretary of State Wes Allen is being sued by the US Department of Justice for illegally stripping at least 717 citizens of their right to vote right before the election, based on the easily debunked conspiracy theory that noncitizens, the ghost of Hugo Chávez in a trenchcoat, or Jewish-Italian space lasers in a dress, wig, and false eyelashes are voting. As Democrats, probably!
The National Voter Registration Act prohibits mass purges of voters within 90 days of an election, but do you think Alabama got to be the state it is today by giving one single deep-fried fuck?
Eighty-four days before the election, the state secretary of state removed 3,251 voters from the rolls, using databases with “obsolete data” and “well-documented database errors” to “prove” that these voters on the state rolls were not citizens. Surprise, surprise, this ham-handed effort erroneously disenfranchised hundreds of eligible voters, and now the DOJ is suing Allen get him to put them back on.
Allen’s office identified these suspect voters just last month, though they’d had the past four years to do it. Then they sent out baffling letters informing them that they were “on the path to removal,” requesting that they fill out a Voter Removal Request to remove themselves, “or if you are a citizen of the United States or otherwise eligible to vote in Alabama, please complete and submit the enclosed State of Alabama voter registration form.” And then they sent another letter telling them that voters who vote absentee “are encouraged to first update” their information with their local Board of Registrar, but also “Regardless, you will be allowed to vote absentee pursuant to the normal process.”
So far 717 citizens have re-registered themselves, which means they were never ineligible in the first place. That’s a margin of error of at least 22 percent! At least, because who knows how many people didn’t see the letter, mistook it for junk mail, or took the contradictory instructions to mean that they could vote absentee without a problem. Some of the removed voters were people who were born in other countries and had become naturalized after 2020, and some were American-born people who happened to get swept up in the database, which in Alabama is apparently a mule with a pencil.
Shades of what happened in Virginia in 2023, when Steve Bannon’s buddy, Republican governor, private-equity goblin, and Confederate statue-humper Glenn Youngkin whoops-oops removed 3,400 voters, then lied that it was only 270 and blamed bad software. Weaponized incompetence, it’s not just for people trying to get out of doing laundry by washing your favorite sweaters on “extra hot”!
The easy oopses (or on-purpose “oopses”) are why mass purges are a problem, and why federal law prohibits them from happening within 90 days of an election to give voters a chance to correct the oopses. But disenfranchising people before they have a chance to realize it and re-register seems to be the point.
Purging voter rolls, so hot right now! See also Nevada, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Illinois … Marc Elias reports that his law firm currently has 170 voting and election cases pending in 36 states. Nice of the DOJ to pitch in with one of them. If you want to try to keep up on all the election fucketeering, Democracy Docket is the place to follow.
Until next time!
[Democracy Docket/ Washington Post gift link/ US v. Alabama and Wes Allen]
“on the path to removal”
This is pompous enough that I will use it regularly. "You are on the path to removal!" I will announce to the garbage, on garbage day.
OT: we went out foraging for supplies, and were successful, but had to go to two stores. More traffic lights are working, crews are working hard to clear roads, more stores and gas stations are opened. Also, prices seem to be holding steady - thanks, Mr, President, for anti-price gouging laws during disasters!