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In recent weeks, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen has begun claiming that the “radical and lawless” Biden administration is trying to win the presidential election by supposedly “[diluting] the power of the vote of legal Americans.”
Allen claimed in a June 5 press release that “it is clear that Biden is attempting to win the upcoming election, not by winning over legitimate American voters, but by attempting to legitimize illegal immigrants.”
“The Biden Administration is knowingly and purposefully enacting policies that result in supplying non-citizens with a mechanism to register to vote in our state and all 49 other states,” Allen said in another press release.
On a recent episode of “Priority Talk with Greg Davis,” a conservative Christian radio show and podcast, Allen explained why he began questioning national voter registration policies.
“I got a complaint from an Alabama resident that their deceased relative who had been dead for two years received in the mail a voter registration form,” Allen said. “That raised some red flags with us and it got us asking a bunch of different questions and leading us down a rabbit hole.”
Allen specifically singled out the National Voter Registration Act, which requires many federal agencies to provide voter registration forms to people who use their services. This requirement “includes legal non-citizens, and it also includes illegal aliens,” Allen stated.
The NVRA was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993 with the support of 21 Republicans in the House and 4 Republicans in the Senate. Clinton called the NVRA the nation’s “newest civil rights law” and said “voting should be about discerning the will of the majority, not about testing the administrative capacity of a citizen.”
Show host Greg Davis told Allen a story about updating his voter registration while renewing his driver’s license a couple weeks ago. “That makes it awful easy,” Davis remembered telling the DMV employee.
Despite Allen’s concerns about the NVRA, people registering to vote at DMVs or other government offices still must pass many of the same eligibility checks as everyone else.
Under the NVRA, each voter registration form must still “state each voter eligibility requirement (including citizenship), contain an attestation that the applicant meets each requirement, state the penalties provided by law for submission of a false voter registration application and require the signature of the applicant under penalty of perjury” [emphasis added].
Even after an application is filled out, under Alabama law, “no person shall be registered until a majority of the board of registrars has passed favorably upon the person’s qualifications,” which includes citizenship.
And while Allen disapproves of non-citizens potentially being offered voter registration forms, nothing prevents non-citizens from accessing the online voter registration form or downloadable PDF that Allen’s office maintain.
So far, Allen has not provided any examples of non-citizens in Alabama registering to vote or actually voting after receiving a registration form thanks to the NVRA.
“The federal government in my mind does not need to be making it easy, or you know, allowing it to be for these illegal aliens or legal non citizens to even register to vote, much less vote,” Allen said.
“We’re going to have to get President Trump back in there,” Allen opined. “We’re going to have to get a GOP majority in the Senate and a GOP majority in the United States House of Representatives to reform the NVRA to allow states to, number one, give us tools to verify citizenship. And then take these agencies out of the voter registration business.”
Allen specifically pointed to the Citizen Ballot Protection Act, which was introduced by Alabama Rep. Gary Palmer and Alabama Senator Katie Britt, as his ideal legislation. The CBPA would allow states to require proof of citizenship on voter registration forms distributed under the NVRA.
As is, Allen says that the NVRA “weaponizes, mobilizes, the entire federal government apparatus and turns them into voter registration agencies.”
In addition to the NVRA, Allen also said that Biden’s decision to help the non-citizen spouses and children of American citizens apply for permanent residency is proof of a presidential plot to corrupt the November election.
The June 18 executive order applies only to noncitizens “legally married to a U.S. citizen” who “have resided in the United States for 10 or more years.” Additionally, it only allows them to apply for permanent residency within the next three years.
For lawful permanent residents married to a U.S. citizen, it takes three years to naturalize and become a U.S. citizen. Between the processing time for permanent residency applications and the three years wait, non-citizens affected by Biden’s executive order will not be able to vote in November, or even in the 2026 midterms.
“Election integrity is a top priority of this office,” Allen said. “Nobody, not even President Biden, is going to get me to back down from that.”
