Voting in Alabama

In case you forgot - or didn't know - the special election to fill Jeff Sessions' vacated Alabama Senate seat  is tomorrow.

Republican Roy Moore is running not only against Jones, but against a mountain of allegations of sexual assault and harassment of several teenagers. According to the most recent Washington Post-Schar School poll, with renewed support from the national GOP, a presidential endorsement, and a powerful state machine behind him, Moore is keeping the race close, still only three points behind Doug Jones. A collection of other smaller polls actually show Moore pulling ahead in the last week. For Jones to win with such thin margins, he’ll need to turn out black voters. But doing so will mean confronting the state’s fraught history of voter suppression.

[...]

The Washington Post-Schar School poll shows [Moore] retaining the support of 63 percent of likely white voters in the state, including 57 percent of white women. While these numbers show that the onslaught of allegations of crimes against women have hurt him somewhat—recently, Republican presidential candidates in the state have garnered upwards of 70 percent of the white electorate—they also show that there appears to be nothing that can entirely stop the dominance of any GOP candidate with white Alabamians.

  The Atlantic

I keep seeing Alabamians. Isn't it Alabamans? Or is that just our southern drawl/dialect showing through?

As headline after headline attests, [Democrat Doug Jones will] likely have to see decent turnout among the 26 percent of voting-age citizens who are black, and who largely live in the “black belt” of counties spanning the width of Alabama through the east and west of Montgomery.

[...]

[The] Alabama secretary of state’s office estimates that only about a million people overall will vote in Tuesday’s election. That would be good for a paltry 26 percent overall, predictions that would follow an incredibly low 14 percent turnout for the Republican primary run-off, and speak to the general level of interest in the special election.

So, it's just the rest of the country that's fixated on this?

[I]n the 2016 election, black turnout dropped for the first time in 20 years, effectively ending the strength of the “Obama coalition” in the process. While some of this drop-off has been attributed to disinterest, and some of it is certainly simply mean-reversion after the anomalous appeal of Barack Obama, the fact that black turnout dipped below even 2004 levels, and that the decline was especially steep among men, might indicate some other forces at work.

Nefarious forces?

Alabama was one of the collection of Southern states that either passed or began enforcing new voter ID laws after the requirement for federal pre-clearance was effectively made null. While the state’s requirement is not as strict as the well-publicized laws of some other states, and does allow voters to receive free voter-ID cards, the implementation of the law still appeared to be more about discrimination than anything else.

How so?

In 2015, state Republicans announced the closures of 31 DMV offices across the state, ostensibly in a cost-saving measure. But AL.com journalists Kyle Whitmore and John Archibald found that the closures were concentrated in the black belt, and that of the 10 counties with the highest percentage of nonwhite voters, the state closed DMV offices in eight, and left them without offices entirely, meaning those voters either had to travel long distances to other counties to get licenses or visit special registrar’s offices in order to vote.

Cost-saving indeed. The cost of having blacks with voting rights.

In an agreement with DOT last December, the state did agree to expand the hours of some of the offices.

How generous.

Early voting, which has been a key factor for other states in increasing black turnout, is not permitted in Alabama. The state also doesn’t have no-fault absentee voting, preregistration for teens, or same-day registration.* In all, it’s harder to vote in Alabama than just about anywhere else, a dynamic that should tend towards cooling the turnout of people who’ve only been allowed to vote in the state for 50 years.

Until this year, the state retained a white-supremacist “moral turpitude” clause allowing registrars to block black people with felonies from voting. Although Governor Kay Ivey signed a bill in May reversing that rule, a federal court ruled that the state had no obligation to ever inform people with felonies that they could register to vote.

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill [...] announced his opposition to automatic voter registration in DMVs, saying that the law “cheapen[s] the work” of civil-rights icons like Georgia Congressman John Lewis.

That may be the whitest excuse I've ever heard.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.