Despite Minority Turnout, Scrutiny Over Alabama Voter ID Law

The following is from an excerpt from the article, Despite Minority Turnout, Alabama Faces Scrutiny Over Voter ID Law, by Daniel Jackson of Courthouse News, a nationwide news service for lawyers and the news media based in Pasadena, California. Continue reading here:

Poll workers were said to be thrown off by recently married women carrying photo IDs with names that didn’t match the names on the voter rolls, or by voters who showed up with their hair cut and dyed differently than the picture on their ID.

In Mobile, Ala., poll workers were telling voters that the address printed on their IDs had to match the address listed on the voter rolls – which is not a requirement under Alabama law, according to Deuel Ross, a civil rights attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund…

…While Jones won by about 30,000 votes, the Legal Defense Fund estimates 118,000 Alabama citizens are unable to vote because they don’t have the proper ID to do so.

The following is from an excerpt from a second article, Alabama’s Effort to Suppress Black Vote Couldn’t Prevent Huge Turnout, from the ACLU of Alabama. Continue reading here:

One of the most obvious ways officials have attempted to suppress the African American vote is by imposing a requirement that voters have one of a limited set of forms of photo ID, while, at the same time, making it more difficult to obtain photo ID by closing 31 driver’s license offices in counties — including every county in which African Americans are 70 percent or more of the population.

State officials denied that these closures caused a “disparate and adverse effect based on race,” as a federal investigation determined. The state was ordered to reopen the offices, but many of the offices were reopened on a very limited schedule. For example, a person in Sumter County, which is majority African American, can only visit the driver’s license office on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month from 8-12pm or 12:30-2:30pm to get a driver’s license or non-driver ID. If they arrive without the proper paperwork to get the identification, they must wait an entire month before trying again.