The Biden-Harris Justice Department is suing Alabama for removing more than 3,000 noncitizens from voter rolls just weeks after a coalition of left-leaning groups—including the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center—filed a similar lawsuit.
Alabama is far from a battleground state, but the Justice Department’s move could have national consequences by setting a legal precedent for whether and how other states may remove those who aren’t U.S. citizens from voter registration lists.
Neither the organizations in the private lawsuit against Alabama nor the Justice Department replied to inquiries Monday from The Daily Signal on whether the two separate lawsuits were coordinated or whether communication occurred between the agency and the private organizations about them.
In March 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing every federal agency, including the Justice Department, to cooperate with private nonprofit organizations to increase voter participation and registration. The Justice Department has invoked presidential privilege to prevent the public from seeing its strategic plan for implementing Biden’s order.
Three of the top plaintiffs in the private lawsuit against Alabama—the SPLC, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Fair Elections Center—participated in a White House Zoom conference in July 2021 about how to implement Biden’s Executive Order 14019. The other two plaintiffs are the Alabama chapters of the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, whose national organizations were represented at the White House conference.
In August, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, a Republican, instructed election officials in all 67 counties to inactivate the state’s 3,251 registered voters identified as noncitizens by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The Justice Department now contends that the state’s removal of those names violates the 1993 National Voter Registration Act because it comes fewer than 90 days before Election Day, which is Nov. 5.
“The right to vote is one of the most sacred rights in our democracy,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said Friday in a public statement.
“As Election Day approaches, it is critical that Alabama redress voter confusion resulting from its list maintenance mailings sent in violation of federal law,” Clarke said. “Officials across the country should take heed of the National Voter Registration Act’s clear and unequivocal restrictions on systematic list maintenance efforts that fall within 90 days of an election.”
Interestingly, the Biden-Harris Justice Department has at least acknowledged a problem with noncitizen voting in Alabama. Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney Prim F. Escalona of the Northern District of Alabama charged an illegal immigrant with unlawfully voting in multiple elections.
The Alabama secretary of state’s office said Allen made repeated requests for assistance from the federal government since discovering that over 3,000 noncitizens were registered to vote. Lacking cooperation from the federal government, his office acted.
However, any flagged individual may notify election officials if he or she has become naturalized and then will be able to vote, according to a press release from Allen’s office.
“I was elected secretary of state by the people of Alabama, and it is my constitutional duty to ensure that only American citizens vote in our elections,” Allen said in a public statement.
Specifically regarding DOJ’s lawsuit against Alabama, Allen’s office said it doesn’t comment on pending litigation in which the secretary of state is a named defendant.
As detailed in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” the National Voting Registration Act of 1993 also requires states to maintain updated voter registration lists. Noncitizens and illegal immigrants who are registered to vote and voting have represented a longstanding problem.
The two lawsuits against Alabama come after Senate Democrats blocked the House-passed SAVE Act requiring individuals to show proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, who sponsored the Senate version of the SAVE Act, criticized the Justice Department’s move in a post on the social media site X.
“Democrats insisted ‘noncitizens don’t vote.’ On that basis, they blocked the SAVE Act,” the Utah senator posted. “Now that thousands of noncitizen voter files are being discovered in state after state, Democrats are trying to stop those states from removing noncitizens from their voter files. Infuriating.”
The Justice Department announced the lawsuit Friday, just two weeks after six left-leaning organizations announced their lawsuit Sept. 13 on behalf of four individuals in Alabama. The litigants in that private lawsuit are the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Campaign Legal Center, the Fair Elections Center, the Alabama Coalition for Immigration Justice, the Alabama NAACP, and the League of Women Voters of Alabama.
The Campaign Legal Center responded to an inquiry from The Daily Signal to say a spokesperson wouldn’t be able to comment Monday. A staffer from the Alabama Coalition for Immigration Justice responded that the group’s executive director, Allison Hamilton, had a full schedule and wouldn’t be able to comment.
The other litigants in the private lawsuit didn’t respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal by publication time.
The litigants have made public statements in press releases, however.
“Today, we are suing to end this discriminatory program that’s in clear violation of the NVRA—and to protect the rights of thousands of eligible voters that the state of Alabama is trying to silence,” Jess Unger, senior staff attorney for voting rights at the SPLC, said in a public statement referring to the National Voting Registration Act.
Paul Smith, senior vice president of the Campaign Legal Center, said: “In practice, voter purges like what we are seeing in Alabama target naturalized citizens and prevent qualified Americans from exercising their right to vote.”
