Phenix City voters are entitled to some answers about legitimacy of votes in council elections
Whether the Phenix City voting flap is indeed a case a voter fraud or just some kind of political/bureaucratic tangle, the impatience of many in the city, including most prominently the Phenix City branch of the NAACP, is more than just understandable; it’s quite justified.
This matter was brought to official attention on Nov. 20; a Phenix City Council runoff is now a week away, and the legitimacy of 82 voters in the Nov. 14 election has still not been cleared up.
As has been reported in several stories by Alva James-Johnson, people who allegedly do not live in the city were said to have voted in the Nov. 14 election; City Manager Wallace Hunter later reported that some registered voters listed commercial addresses on their registration forms. The Rev. Alfonza Seldon of the local NAACP branch said at least 52 non-residents had voted using business address registrations.
Phenix City police last month asked the Russell County Board of Registrars to remove those 82 suspect names from the list before next week’s runoff. A member of that board reportedly told NAACP officials that there were conflicting definitions in different versions of election code as to how “primary domicile” should be defined. (Possible legal technicalities aside, there’s precious little ambiguity in how most people define those two words.)
The Alabama Secretary of State’s office will be asked for clarification of the law, Seldon said, which is probably the best next step.
If the integrity of the voting process is compromised, regardless of whether it’s by manipulation, error or confusion, the foundation of public trust is eroded.
Point taken, but …
It’s not an interest group elected lawmakers would feature on their websites or campaign ads. So the adult nightclub industry is taking what it considers a legitimate grievance to the courts.
Said grievance, in the eyes of club owners, is a new tax scheduled to take effect Jan. 1 that would require strip clubs and other such establishments to pay the higher of $5,000 or 1 percent of revenues into a state “Safe Harbor for Sexually Exploited Children Fund” created for victims of child sex trafficking.
The “strip club tax” is part of a state constitutional amendment Georgia voters approved last fall. (The other part will increase fines for sex-related crimes, and it’s hard to imagine anybody objecting to that one.)
The club owners’ argument is that they are engaged in a lawful and licensed business, whatever one’s personal convictions about it, and that singling it out for taxation based on an assumed “correlation” with child sexual predation is both illogical and unconstitutional.
The argument has merit, and how it fares in court will be interesting. But as we argued last fall in endorsing the amendment, while patrons of such establishments are rarely sexual predators, “‘sin taxes’ on other legal things like tobacco and alcohol sales fund health and safety programs, and this is roughly comparable.”
That too, however, is a correlation perhaps subject to debate.
This story was originally published December 11, 2017 at 5:12 PM with the headline "Phenix City voters are entitled to some answers about legitimacy of votes in council elections."