Private: Alabama’s Shame: Driver’s License Office Closings Are the Foreseeable Consequence of Shelby County

by Deuel Ross, Fried Frank Fellow, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

On Friday, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF), on behalf of our allies at Greater Birmingham Ministries and the Alabama NAACP, wrote a letter to the state of Alabama about its decision to close 31 of its Department of Public Safety (DPS) driver’s license-issuing offices. The state’s decision shuttered DPS offices in eleven rural counties: Choctaw, Sumter, Hale, Greene, Perry, Wilcox, Lowndes, Butler, Crenshaw, Macon, and Bullock. These eleven counties make up most of Alabama’s “Black Belt”—a region with large concentrations of African Americans, incredibly high poverty rates, and almost no public transportation.

In our letter, LDF noted that there is a strong likelihood that Alabama’s actions violate the protections provided by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the United States Constitution. But what do driver’s license offices have to do with voting? A lot, actually.

In 2014, Alabama began enforcing a strict photo ID law which requires voters to show a driver’s license or another form of photo ID in order to cast a ballot. Alabama did so despite the state’s own analysis, which found that at least  250,000 registered voters don’t have a driver’s license or other acceptable photo ID. One such voter was Willie Mims, a 93-year-old African American who was turned away from his usual polling place because he did not have a driver’s license. African Americans like Mr. Mims very likely account for a disproportionate share of those thousands of voters that the photo ID law may disenfranchise. In addition, the federal National Voter Registration Act requires Alabama’s DPS offices to provide voters with opportunities to register to vote. Alabama recently agreed to adopt measures designed to increase such opportunities for voter registration.

In light of the close relationship between voting and driver’s license offices, and despite Alabama officials’ half-hearted denials, these closures will drastically reduce the number of locations where African-American voters can go to ensure their unfettered access to the ballot. These closings in the poorest, most rural parts of the state’s African-American community smack of the cavalier racism of the Jim Crow era and open yet another chapter in Alabama’s long and egregious history of suppressing the African-American vote.

Indeed, for 48 years, Alabama was one of several states with similar histories that were required by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to get federal approval before changing their voting practices. But in a 2013 case brought by Shelby County, Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court immobilized Section 5.

So, many are rightly skeptical of the timing of these announcements: first a new photo ID law in 2014 and then the closure of the DPS offices in 2015. Both of these decisions coincided with the suspension of the state’s preclearance obligations under Section 5, which likely would have prevented the office closures as well as implementation of the photo ID law—as it often did in the past in Perry, Sumter, Wilcox, and other counties.

Alabama’s lack of transparency is shameful. LDF stands ready to use the remaining parts of the Voting Rights Act to challenge the foreseeable impact of these DPS closings and to push Congress to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore those protections lost in the aftermath of Shelby County. We call on others to stand with us.

Democracy and Elections, Racial Justice, Voting Rights