Alabama has followed its voter ID requirement that went into effect last year with closing drivers license offices in eight of 10 counties with majority black voting populations. The voter suppression effect is complemented by raising the fee for driver license renewal from $23.50 to $36.25 earlier this year.
Updated to include more information below the orange squiggle.
According to John Archibald at al.com:
Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters. That's Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes, Bullock, Perry, Wilcox, Dallas, Hale, and Montgomery, according to the Alabama Secretary of State's office. Alabama, thanks to its budgetary insanity and inanity, just opted to close driver license bureaus in eight of them. All but Dallas and Montgomery will be closed.
Closed. In a state in which driver licenses or special photo IDs are a requirement for voting.
...
Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one.
As explained by al.com's Kyle Whitmire:
On Wednesday, the [Alabama Law Enforcement Agency] announced that it would close 31 offices throughout the state, leaving 29 counties without a place where 16-year-olds can take a driver's test, whether they pass on the first try or not.
That's an inconvenience.
But there's something bigger happening here.
In 2011, Alabama lawmakers approved the state's voter ID law, making it illegal to vote in Alabama without a government-issued photo ID.
For most folks, that's a driver's license.
In those 29 counties you might be able to register at the courthouse, but you won't be able to cast a ballot there unless you have that ID.
Closing these offices comes as part of a larger overall slashing of the state budget but that is hardly the point. Blacks have been disproportionately impacted by the closures and it is highly unlikely that no-one recognized that before pressing "Go" on the decision. Welcome to the new Jim Crow.
In July of 2015, American Progress Action released a report titled "The Health of State Democracies". Alabama consistently garnered the poorest marks in every category assessed - earning itself the dubious title of 'weakest democracy' in the country. The categories assessed included:
• Accessibility of the ballot;
• Representation in state government; and
• Influence in the political system.
Regarding voter ID laws, the report makes the impact on voter participation abundantly clear:
According to the Government Accountability Office, states that made voter ID requirements more restrictive in advance of the 2012 presidential election saw a steeper drop-off in voter turnout than other states—with a disproportionate effect among African American and young voters. Voter identification laws disenfranchise voters who are unable to produce personal identification documents to the satisfaction of the state. According to the Government Accountability Office, states that made voter ID requirements more restrictive in advance of the 2012 presidential election saw a steeper drop-off in voter turnout than other states—with a disproportionate effect among African American and young voters.
The numbers tell a similar story in states that have enacted new legislation since the 2012 election. For instance, now that the Supreme Court has determined that Wisconsin’s voter ID requirements should take effect, roughly 300,000 voters—largely Hispanic and African American voters—will lack the required documents.
In South Carolina, roughly 178,000 voters lack the required identification to cast a vote, with an Associated Press analysis finding that this new requirement hits African American voters particularly hard. And in Texas, African American voters are 305 percent more likely than white voters to lack ID, while Hispanic voters are 195 percent more likely to be unable to produce the required documentation. These restrictive identification requirements most likely contributed to Texas’ voter turnout dropping 5 percentage points from 2010 to 2014.
Seniors are also disproportionately affected by voter ID rules: According to AARP, approximately 8 million people over 65 years of age, or almost 20 percent of this age group, do not have a government-issued photo ID and are “more likely to lack birth certificates because they were born before recording births was standard procedure.
Regarding Alabama's voter ID laws, the state offers free IDs to qualifying people as long as they apply in person at the the county Board of Registrars. This can be done at the same time voter registration forms are filed but the requirement to be there in person adds an immediate hurdle to the entire process. Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill says not to worry though - his office will send a mobile ID van to every county in Alabama by October 31st. A quick glance at the schedule indicates that
the van will spend a total of three hours in each county visited.
Assuming people can't drop everything they are doing the day the van speeds through (or miss it because they didn't know it was there), Merrill says the counties can request to have the van come back. Sounds like a great and efficient plan in which nothing could go wrong...
In a Facebook statement, the Alabama chapter of the ACLU stated:
Alabama's decision to cut out ID services to almost all counties with a majority black population is discriminatory and wrong.
Before the Supreme Court struck down key provisions in the Voting Rights Act last year, something like this would have had to be reviewed by the Department of Justice. This is why we need to stand together and show our lawmakers that we need an update to the Voting Rights Act, and we need it now.
But if we really want a picture of how backwards this takes an already failing state, consider this excerpt from a
July 2015 US News & World Report article about the dismal progress of democracy in Alabama:
"Alabama has a long history of suppression of the voting of black and poor white citizens," writes Jeremy Lewis, a political science professor, in an email interview.
Lewis, who teaches at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, says the suppression of the black vote was an early symptom of a more insidious disease: an iron-triangle of a power structure that discounted anyone not rich and white. Things didn't turn around until well after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law; until then, he said, the political elites weren't shy about denying the black vote, or manipulating it to help preserve their power.
"While there is little evidence of individual voter fraud," the justification for most new voter-ID laws, "it took decades to reduce the mass fraudulent practices of the (white) county registrars," Lewis writes.
You can read more about Alabama's restrictive voter ID laws
here. Particularly interesting is the pdf explaining rules of issuing free voter IDs.