Reports of Voter Suppression Tactics Pour In From Alabama Election

[deminks]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/reports-of-voter-suppression-tactics-pour-in-from-alabama-election/

The Alabama Senate election is shining a national spotlight on Alabama, and not in the most flattering way.

Almost as soon as voting to underway on Tuesday, civil rights groups began receiving hundreds of complaints of voter suppression, and residents and reporters took to social media to report tactics used to intimidate minority voters or force them to cast provisional ballots.

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law had received 235 calls to its voter hotline as of 3:24 p.m. The group aims to provide live assistance to voters, and it’s unclear how many of the calls were to report voting irregularities rather than simply asking for assistance. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has been collecting reports of voting problems in Alabama, some of them secondhand, including multiple reports of people being put on inactive status and erroneously prevented from voting.

“Some of these voters are told that they cannot vote,” Coty Montag, the director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote in a roundup on Tuesday afternoon. “Others are being given provisional ballots. The correct [procedure] is that voters who appear on the inactive list must be allowed an opportunity to re-identify and vote a regular ballot.”

(snip)

She claims that the precinct was denying inactive voters the right to cast a ballot if they did not remember the county they were born in. If true, this would violate federal law. A spokesman for the Alabama secretary of state did not respond to a request for comment about this incident. “More disturbing (if true from anecdotal reports) is that the voter needs to name county of brith,” election law expert Rick Hasen wrote on Twitter of the report about inactive voter issues. “Sounds a lot like the OLD Alabama.” Voters should not be put on inactive status unless they have not voted for four years, according to Alabama law.

(end snip)

[Dustlawyer]

1. We need to be preparing for voter suppression in 2018 since the Republicans know they have an uphill

battle!