Concerns about Alabama voter access are valid

Common Cause, the 45-year-old government watchdog organization with chapters in most states and members in all of them, is a nonpartisan nonprofit that has pressed for accountability and transparency on the part of officials across the political spectrum.

Right now its spotlight -- one of them, anyway -- is on Alabama, where a convergence of budget shortfalls and a constricted (and constricting) voter ID law is creating an obstacle to voting for hundreds of thousands of Alabamians.

CC's national president, Miles Rapoport, sent Gov. Robert Bentley a letter last week urging him to call on the legislature to remedy the problem.

Here's the problem:

The voter ID law the Alabama legislature enacted last year is one the nation's most restrictive. Documents and records long accepted as sufficient identification -- birth certificates, Social Security cards, utility bills and receipts, etc. -- are now invalid for that purpose. (Was there a surge of suspicious voters storming Alabama polls with bogus power bills? We missed that story )

The law passes constitutional muster because photo IDs are available without cost at Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) driver's license offices across the state, even though that form of ID, unlike some of the others formerly accepted, requires the voter to go to a state office to get it.

Good luck with that now. Thirty-one of those offices, mostly in rural areas, have been closed in the state budget crunch.

Rapoport's letter gives the governor a nod for his decision to reopen those offices once a month, but notes that it hardly solves the problem. (Bentley is due more slack than the Common Cause chief knows: If the governor had prevailed in his budget fight with the legislature, this issue might be moot.)

Under the circumstances, it's anything but moot. As Rapoport's letter accurately notes, the closures mainly affect "the substantial number of low-income Alabamians who live in the mostly rural areas where ID offices are closed, and who lack access to public or private transportation that could carry them to other driver's license offices."

And here's a detail not likely to escape Justice Department attention: Among the 31 offices closed are those affecting every Alabama county in which at least 75 percent of registered voters are black. Every single one.

Common Cause is calling for repeal of Alabama's voter ID law ... which isn't going to happen. As an alternative, the organization proposes that the state pass amendments to allow for other legally binding documents, such as an affidavit with a signature match.

Stubborn lawmakers might be hard to convince that ignoring a concern like this, especially one brought to their attention by "outside agitators" (in Alabama, distinctions between 1961 Democrats and 2015 Republicans aren't always very clear), isn't an option. But it isn't.

This story was originally published October 22, 2015 at 4:19 PM with the headline "Concerns about Alabama voter access are valid."