We’re not living in a democracy if legal votes can be eliminated. Just ahead of the November elections, U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco ruled in favor of the Department of Justice and civil rights groups, ending a program that made thousands of legal voters in Alabama inactive and restoring active registration status for American-born and naturalized citizens.
Of course, the voter purging program was launched by the Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen. Republicans do not want people to vote. They’re not efficient at garnering the popular vote.
WSFA reports:
The Department of Justice and a coalition of immigration and voting rights groups sued Allen, arguing in court that the program violated a federal law barring the systemic removal of names from voter rolls 90 days before a federal election.
Affirming that argument, Manasco said Secretary of State Allen’s office “blew the deadline for the 2024 general election, with real consequences for thousands of Alabamians who the secretary now acknowledges are in fact legally entitled to vote.”
The decision comes less than a week after the Department of Justice filed a similar suit in Virginia.
Under the August initiative, the secretary of state’s office identified 3,251 potential noncitizens registered to vote using foreign national numbers collected by state agencies on both unemployment benefits and driver’s license applications. He then instructed local board of registrars to make those voters inactive, which doesn’t immediately remove them from the voter rolls but does require the resident to provide additional verification before voting.
The list was also given to the Alabama Attorney General for “possible criminal prosecution.”
Approximately 2,000 of the 3,251 voters who were made inactive were legally registered citizens, according to testimony from the secretary of state’s chief of staff Clay Helms on Tuesday.More than 900 of the initial 3,251 voters proved they were legal voters by September, according to Helms’ testimony. On Tuesday, less than a month before the election, another 1,000 were reactivated after the secretary of state’s office doublechecked driver’s license information from the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, Helms said. Those voters were sent registered voter cards with polling information.
Interestingly, the party that claims people are illegally casting ballots is the same party trying to eliminate legal votes.
