MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The Alabama attorney general’s office filed a request Wednesday that a court not issue a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit over the state’s efforts to remove some voters from the voter roll.
In the 32-page filing, the state wrote that the plaintiffs challenging the removal misunderstood Secretary of State Wes Allen’s August news release to read it as proposing a systematic and untimely voter purge that targets naturalized citizens.
“They were just wrong about the nature of the process, which they said would ‘immediately inactivate … and remove’ thousands of naturalized citizens,” they wrote. “…There’s a world of difference between that accusation and the reality hidden by the ellipsis: Secretary Allen instructed registrars to ‘inactivate and initiate steps necessary to remove all individuals who are not United States Citizens.”
A spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office Thursday wrote that “it is the responsibility of the federal government to help States identify noncitizens who have illegally registered to vote.”
“But the federal government did not uphold its duty, so Alabama took reasonable steps to identify people on our voter rolls who are likely to be noncitizens,” the statement said. “The State informed them that if they are not citizens, it is illegal for them to vote, but any citizen who is otherwise eligible to vote remains eligible to vote. Rather than work with Alabama, the federal government is trying to undermine our attempts to ensure free and fair elections. We believe their latest suit will fail and that the State’s commonsense measures will be deemed lawful.”
The Secretary of State had issued the news release in August, writing that they were in the process of taking steps to remove people from voter rolls who had been issued non-citizen identification numbers
“I was elected Secretary of State by the people of Alabama, and it is my Constitutional duty to ensure that only American citizens vote in our elections,” wrote Allen in a statement Thursday.
The Campaign Legal Center is among the attorneys for the plaintiffs, which includes voting rights groups.
“Alabama’s voter purge scheme targets Americans who have worked hard to become citizens and have the same right to vote as all other Americans,” wrote Kate Huddleston, senior legal counsel for litigation, at the Campaign Legal Center. “Every American should be able to make their voice heard in the November election and we hope the court sides with voters by blocking this policy from denying more Americans their freedom to vote.”
“With less than 33 days until the election and 18 days to ensure voters are registered, the state’s tactic of removing over 3,000 names from the voter rolls is a clear act of intimidation that violates federal law,” wrote Jess Unger, senior staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, also among the plaintiffs’ attorneys in a statement. “Our clients, along with all naturalized citizens, have worked hard to achieve the American dream, which includes the freedom to vote.”
The lawsuit filed last month by voting rights groups alleged that the state’s move violated the constitution and federal law. Last week, the Department of Justice filed a separate lawsuit, mostly focusing on the removal of voters occurring too close to the election. The cases were consolidated, but the Wednesday filing was in specific response to the private plaintiffs’ request.
Allen declined to comment on the federal part of the lawsuit.
“As to the question regarding the Department of Justice’s lawsuit, this office does not comment on pending litigation where the Secretary of State is a named defendant,” he wrote.
The state argued that the local plaintiffs lacked standing in the case.
“The private Individual Plaintiffs do not have standing to seek injunctive relief because there is no threat of imminent harm to them,” the state’s attorneys wrote. “To the extent that the two individuals who received letters and became Inactive were injured, their harms are purely retrospective and cannot qualify for prospective injunctive relief.”
They wrote that the other two plaintiffs did not receive such letters.
State attorneys wrote that the state was allowed to make voters inactive in the time the secretary of state issued his directive.
The state also filed a motion to dismiss the case Wednesday, and the U.S. Department of Justice also requested a preliminary injunction. The judge had not responded to any of the Wednesday filings as of early Thursday afternoon.
This article originally appeared in the Alabama Reflector, an independent, nonprofit news outlet. It appears on FOX54.com under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
