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The following is a statement released Tuesday by the president of the League of Women Voters of Alabama to the Senate County and Municipal Government Committee on the House Bill 479 substitute bill:
“Quoting from the National Conference of State Legislatures website: ‘Voter registration lists are the foundation for running great elections, identifying everything from who is registered to vote to the style of ballot voters receive and the races they can vote on….Everyone benefits from accurate voter rolls.”
“ERIC, the Election Registration Information Center, is an interstate compact that helps states to improve voter roll accuracy by serving as a one-stop shop for list maintenance and data comparison. Member states share their voter registration data with ERIC through an encrypted data transfer, and ERIC provides them with monthly reports on voters who have moved or died as well as on duplicate registrations. With these reports, states undertake their own verification processes.”
“Alabama has chosen to take a different path, and is developing its own home-grown AVID tool to assist them with voter roll maintenance. That is not our concern today.
“While we certainly appreciate the Secretary of State’s dedication to ensuring that the voter rolls are kept up to date and tidy, we are concerned with added language in the HB479-substitute that would empower a Board of unelected officials to remove anyone from the Voter Roll by a simple majority vote. The League is asking that this specific language (lines 162-164) be removed from the bill, ‘Removal of any registered individual determined to be improperly registered may be accomplished at any time by a majority vote of the board.’
“With this one sentence, the HB479-Substitute, as passed by the House, presents several concerning issues:
- It violates the NVRA requirement that voter roll maintenance be conducted systematically with a consistent, fair, transparent, defined timeline and process that provides citizens with due process to reclama before they are removed as voters;
- It appears to revert Alabama to the egregious era prior to the 1965 Voting Rights Act,when registrars were empowered to selectively disenfranchise citizens without accountability;
- The term ‘the board’ is ambiguous and raises the question on the composition, operational procedures, and responsibilities of ‘the board.’ It seems likely that the Secretary of State’s office new voter roll maintenance responsibilities could conflict with or duplicate existing county-level Boards of Registrars responsibilities, increasing the likelihood of citizens being removed in error.
“HB479-Substitute bill received an additional amendment to require the Secretary of State to report the number of people purged by county. Then it was passed out of committee today, Tuesday, April 29, 2025, with a favorable recommendation. Our concerns were not addressed as it is heading to a full vote by the Senate,” the statement concluded.
