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Merrill: Alabama working to finally comply with ‘motor voter’ rules

Calhoun County Chooses

A voter walks into the Wiggins Community Center during a 2014 election.

Alabama has never fully complied with the federal “motor voter” act designed to allow people to register to vote at driver’s license offices, Secretary of State John Merrill acknowledged this week.

Still, Merrill said, he hoped the state could avoid a federal lawsuit by working to implement the law now.

“It’s like being pregnant,” Merrill said in a Monday telephone interview. “Either you’re fully in compliance with the law or you’re not in compliance. And we’ve never been compliant.”

The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice sent state officials a letter last month warning of a lawsuit if the state didn’t comply with Section 5 of the National Voter Registration Act, popularly known as the “motor voter” act.

The law requires states to make voter registration available to people when they renew their driver’s licenses, apply for Medicaid or conduct other common transactions with state government.

That change led state officials to begin supplying voter registration cards to people at driver’s license offices when the law took effect in the mid-1990s. That in turn led to the registration of tens of thousands of new voters, according to Star accounts from the time.

But the state’s approach may not have followed the letter of the law. The state was supposed to set up a single form that would work as both a driver’s license application and a voter registration, Merrill said. Instead, Alabama drivers would apply for their licenses, then fill out separate voter registration cards they could mail in.

“That’s not the way it was designed to work,” Merrill said.

Justice Department officials declined to comment on the lawsuit threat Monday. So did officials in the Alabama attorney general’s office, where the DOJ letter was sent.

But Merrill and Secretary of Law Enforcement Spencer Collier both said Monday that they began working on ways to fully comply with the law long before the Justice Department intervened.

“I was working on it, because I knew it was a problem,” Merrill said. Merrill didn’t discuss details of the solution but said it would be in place by the 2016 elections.

It’s unclear why the DOJ chose to intervene now. Voting rights groups in 2012 said they’d sue over similar “motor voter” issues, but court records suggest no suits were ever filed.

Merrill said Georgia and other Southern states have been sued over “motor voter” recently, part of a renewed attention to the law.

“They’re looking at everyone,” he said. “It was only a matter of time before they got to us.”

Capitol & statewide reporter Tim Lockette: 256-294-4193. On Twitter @TLockette_Star.

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