“I have been clear that I will not tolerate the participation of noncitizens in our elections,” Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen said on August 13 as he announced that he had ordered that 3,251 voters to be kicked off the rolls. According to a press release from his office, Allen ordered the purge after discovering that the affected individuals “have been issued noncitizen identification numbers by the Department of Homeland Security.”
Turns out the word “have” is doing a lot of work there, since at least 700 of the affected voters have since become citizens, so the fact that these people at one point had such an identifier is irrelevant. But what is relevant is Section 8(c)(2) of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which specifies a 90-day “quiet period” before the election in which states shall not “clean” their voter rolls.
A State shall complete, not later than 90 days prior to the date of a primary or general election for Federal office, any program the purpose of which is to systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters.
According to calendars — which are WOKE! — August 13 was 84 days before November 5, 2024, and thus Allen was in flagrant violation of the NVRA.
Allen was promptly sued twice, once by a coalition of voting rights groups and affected voters, and then last week by the Justice Department.
The DOJ suit requests injunctive relief ordering Allen to reactivate the purged voters and send them curative letters explaining that he screwed up. The Civil Division didn’t even ask for Allen to undergo remedial Election Law for Dummies training. (Although the court could order it sua sponte!)
The civilian plaintiffs include Roald Hazelhoff, who was born in the Netherlands and became a US citizen in 2022, and James Stroop, who was born in Florida and has been a US citizen all his life.
These are embarrassing errors that were almost inevitable when Allen announced in 2023 that he was pulling the state out of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), the multi-state compact which uses drivers license and other data to compare voter rolls across states and eliminate duplication registrations. Mumbling nonsense about George Soros’s involvement in ERIC, Allen trumpeted the development of the Alabama Voter Integrity Database (AVID), which would do what ERIC did but way less accurately.
“We are the first state in the nation to implement a system like this,” he said proudly.
AVID seems to have worked by combing public records for any indication that a voter was at one time a non-citizen, and then flagging that person for deactivation. In the case of Stroop, he appears to have inadvertently checked a box on an unemployment application in 2021 saying he was a non-citizen. When the unemployment office asked him about it, he immediately amended his application. But there are no backsies in Alabama, and so Allen’s office not only kicked him off the rolls, but informed him he’d have to re-register when he called up to complain about the purge letter.
The civilian plaintiffs advocate a return to the pre-Shelby County preclearance days:
Enter an order pursuant to Section 3(c) of the Voting Rights Act, 52 U.S.C. § 10302(c), retaining jurisdiction for such period of time as may be appropriate, and requiring preclearance of voting changes that the State of Alabama enacts or seeks to administer with respect to removal of persons from the voting rolls on grounds of alleged non-citizenship, as specified in Section 3(c);
The cases have been consolidated and are before Judge Anna Manasco, the Trump appointee who tossed Alabama’s racially gerrymandered districts for violating Section 2 of the VRA. That case, which went to the Supreme Court twice, also featured Allen as the defendant. Seems like he’s on track for another cracking victory this go round.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.