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Maybe Wes Allen doesn’t understand the impact of what he’s doing.
Maybe that’s the reason he so casually shirked off federal law and basic decency last week when he announced a purge of more than 3,000 registered voters from Alabama’s voting rolls based simply on the fact that those people once obtained a noncitizen ID.
Of course, such an ID does not grant one the right to vote, and in order to register those individuals would have to fill out paperwork stating they are U.S. citizens and provide a driver’s license number or a portion of their social security number. Registration forms without those would be flagged.
Additionally, that’s just the registration. Once at the polls, those individuals would have to provide a government-approved ID in order to cast a ballot.
But what makes Allen’s move here so utterly astounding is the way he has gone about determining whether these individuals are on the rolls improperly: He seems to be guessing.
“(Allen) specified that the reason he thinks these 3 ,000 people are not citizens is that they have an ID number from (the Department of Homeland Security),” said Jess Unger, a senior staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center. “That leads us to believe that he is relying on DHS data that non -citizens who need verification for other reasons, maybe work, get an ID number that they can use. Allen, even in the announcement itself, admitted that he didn’t check whether any of these 3 ,000 people have naturalized since they got those ID numbers.”
During an interview on the Alabama Politics This Week podcast, Unger and Tafeni English-Relf, the head of SPLC’s Alabama State Office, walked through the way they – and several other civil rights and voting rights organizations – believe Allen has violated federal law and the chilling effect his actions will have on the legal immigrant communities around the state.
Now, I don’t for a single second believe that Allen lacks the intelligence to understand that what he’s doing here is legally suspect in many ways and that it will ultimately be halted by court action. (And if he doesn’t reverse course quickly, the state of Alabama will likely have to pay the attorneys’ fees for fighting this obviously improper denial of basic rights.)
But here’s where I’m going to be graceful to Allen – in honor of the request of former President Barack Obama at the DNC this week that we take opportunities to be kinder and more willing to engage amicably – and allow that it’s possible that Allen fails to fully understand the overall impact of his actions.
I say that because there’s this belief, particularly within the GOP, that political actions, even when they’re improper, illegal and obviously pandering to the worst of us, are harmless and all just part of the game. That sort of thinking leads people to believe that this action by Allen will almost certainly be struck down by the courts and so no real harm to actual legal voters will occur. It’ll do nothing more than buy him some decent press coverage for a few days and allow him to prattle on and on about preventing illegal immigrants from voting.
The problem is it does matter. It does affect people.
Setting aside the fact that this action could lead to legal voters being denied the right to vote – something we should always, always avoid, especially if you’re the guy in charge of protecting voting rights in the state – it also furthers the negative attitudes and perceptions of immigrants in this country, and in this state.
It’s one more denigration of good people who are, by all accounts, here legally and registered to vote legally. It’s on par with Donald Trump painting immigrants as rapists and murderers, with Fox News describing desperate Hispanic immigrants seeking asylum as “an invasion,” with so many far-right, ignorant people claiming that immigrants are inherently a threat and that they’re more dangerous simply because they’re immigrants.
You know where that gets you?
It gets you to a town hall in Albertville, where scared citizens who exist within the conservative information bubble (and one state lawmaker who did some Facebook research), spouted ignorant, offensive misinformation about hard-working Haitian immigrants who were in their town legally on work visas. It gets you to Athens, where equally scared, misinformed and hateful people called local law enforcement and city officials to express their fears over Haitian immigrants they saw at the local Walmart.
Here are, by all accounts, good and decent people traveling to a foreign country – and allegedly to this place filled with Christians and southern hospitality – at the request of American businesses to fill positions that will provide affordable food to American citizens, and their initial encounters with the supposed good people of these southern towns is anger, fear and outright nastiness.
You see, that’s what those pandering actions of Allen do – they paint immigrants who likely love this country and cherish their citizenship as cheats, as people here to unfairly alter American elections. They help perpetuate this false characterization of immigrant people as being a danger to us, a danger to the country, a danger to “Black jobs,” a threat to our very existence.
I’m going to assume that Wes Allen doesn’t realize this. That he thinks what he’s doing is just another victimless political pander, that in the end no citizen will lose the right to vote and no harm will be done.
I suppose the ultimate test of that is what he’ll do now that he knows differently.
