Alabama Purges Naturalized Citizens from its Voter Rolls
November 10, 2024
By: Krishan Patel
As the home of the case that led to the demise of Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, and by extension preclearance under Section 5, Alabama certainly does not have a reputation as the state with particularly wide access to the ballot. In the decade following Shelby County v. Holder, the turnout gap between white voters and Black voters in Alabama has tripled from a mere 3% in the 2012 election to a 9% in the 2022 election (this is not just because 2022 was a midterm cycle, as the gap was 8% in 2020), and the turnout gap between white voters and non-white voters increased from 7% in the 2012 election to 13% in both the 2020 and 2022 elections. Alabama has again lived up to its reputation as a state with more difficult access to the ballot in 2024: the Alabama legislature both passed a law making it illegal for Alabamians who are not disabled or illiterate to help people other than close family members and or cohabitants to return, fill out, or request absentee ballots and attempted to add 120 new felonies to Alabama’s felony voter disenfranchisement list before the 2024 election. When it comes to voter suppression efforts this year, however, Alabama has not stopped at absentee voters and people with felony conviction histories.
On August 13, 2024, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced that 3,251 people who had been identified in the past as not being citizens of the United States by the federal government would be receiving letters informing them that their voter registration statuses would be changed to inactive, meaning they would be unable to vote. Secretary Allen’s office claimed to have “cross-referenced a list of noncitizen identification numbers provided by the Department of Homeland Security with local voter registration data in order to identify them.” On September 13, 2024, the Campaign Legal Center, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Fair Elections Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, the League of Women Voters of Alabama, the League of Women Voters of Alabama Education Fund, the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, and three naturalized U.S. citizens against Secretary Allen; their complaint stated that the aforementioned method that Secretary Allen employed to purge alleged non-citizen voters from the rolls had improperly “included naturalized citizens, who are U.S. citizens and therefore eligible to vote.” Secretary Allen has acknowledged this would be an inevitable consequence of his purge program, and thus sought to instruct those naturalized citizens whom he had just removed from active voter status in Alabama to go re-register to vote and go through a verification process before they could regain their right to vote. Not only former non-citizens were affected by this policy – according to the plaintiffs’ complaint, “Secretary Allen included on the [‘]Purge List[’] voters who have never been issued noncitizen identification numbers, based on faulty information that they had been. As a result, the Purge List includes and the [‘]Purge Program[’] has also removed from the active voter rolls some eligible voters who are U.S.-born citizens, and has also required these voters to re-register.”
The plaintiffs argue that Secretary Allen’s purge violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause as well as “unfairly burdens” the fundamental right to vote. The plaintiffs also argue that the method the state of Alabama used to execute this voter “purge violates several provisions of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and Voting Rights Act (VRA), which protect voters from discriminatory treatment, unfair removal from the voter rolls and voter intimidation. They argue the state also violated the NVRA’s 90-day ‘quiet period,’ which prohibits removing registered voters from rolls within 90 days of an election.” The plaintiffs are asking the court to block the purge program from going into effect, withdraw the notices of removal, and reinstate active voter registration statuses for citizens who were unfairly removed from the voter rolls.
Two key pieces of context are needed to understand the true motivation behind the purge program effort by Secretary Allen, who has publicly claimed to be fighting for election integrity. The first is that Alabama’s immigrant population has been growing, particularly Latinos, which is why the lawsuit says the effort is intended to “intimidate and disenfranchise naturalized citizens.” The other is that Donald Trump has led a public campaign of accusing the Democratic Party of benefitting from alleged masses of non-citizens voting for them, undocumented Latino immigrants in particular. There is no evidence for this claim, as there is zero indication that significant numbers of non-citizens are fraudulently voting in American elections. It seems likely that Secretary Allen, like others in the Alabama state government, viewed the negative consequences of the purge program on U.S. citizens as a feature, not a bug.