Alabama House passes bill to remove state from national voter integrity database
The Alabama House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that would prohibit the state from participating in the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit that roughly half of the states share data with to validate their voter rolls.
The bill’s passage is the latest step in Alabama’s retreat from ERIC in favor of the Alabama Voter Integrity Database, a file created by Secretary of State Wes Allen in 2023. Alabama is one of nine conservative states that have switched to AVID, though how it functions and the extent of its capabilities remain mostly private.
In an opinion piece published in the Alabama Political Reporter Monday, Allen’s predecessor, John Merrill, claimed that the secretary had “inflated numbers” when reporting his efforts to clean up the state’s voter rolls. He wrote that Allen’s claim last March of having removed nearly 500,000 ineligible voters doesn’t square with the available statistics.
“If Secretary Allen truly removed 500,000 ineligible voters, the total number of registered voters would have dropped to approximately 3,269,586,” Merrill wrote. “And yet, the voter rolls show an increase, not a decrease. To reach the current number, the current administration would have needed to register at least 566,897 new voters since January 2023. That claim defies logic, so show the people the names.”
In a statement provided to StateScoop, Allen said Alabama has in fact registered 591,915 new voters during that period. The statement also bitterly attacks Merrill at length, criticizing him for association with “the leftist radical Bernie Sanders,” for having held video calls with Chinese government officials and his extramarital affair.
“While I, along with most Alabamians, were spending time with our families and fellow church members on Easter Sunday, John Merrill was busy sending out an unsolicited email littered with lies and attacks on my office and my character,” Allen’s statement reads.
The landscape of states and their voter integrity databases meanwhile continues to shift. Though nine states have left ERIC in recent years, some legislative attempts to opt out of the system have failed, including in Georgia and Utah.
Other states, meanwhile, are attempting to join ERIC. Hawaii last year enacted a law requiring the state to apply for ERIC membership. And New York’s Senate last month passed a similar bill.
ERIC’s member states share voter registration and motor vehicle department data every 60 days. They’re also required to provide residents believed to be unregistered to vote with information about voter registration.
