Lawsuit challenges Alabama restrictions on absentee ballot help

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Civil rights organizations and other groups filed a lawsuit Thursday challenging a new Alabama law that criminalizes certain types of assistance with absentee ballot applications.

The Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, and other groups are plaintiffs in the lawsuit that says the law “turns civic and neighborly voter engagement into a serious crime” and disenfranchises voters, including senior citizens and disabled voters who may need assistance in the absentee voting process.

The new prohibition, which was approved by lawmakers and signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey last month, restricts who can prefill or return absentee ballot applications — the form that voters send to request an absentee ballot be mailed to them. The new law makes it a misdemeanor to return another person’s ballot application or distribute an absentee ballot application that is prefilled with information such as the voter’s name. It would become a felony — punishable by up to 20 years in prison — to pay someone to distribute, order, collect, deliver, complete or prefill someone else’s absentee ballot application.

“SB1 takes Alabama backwards as it violates the law, restricts our basic Constitutional Amendment rights, obliterates freedom of speech. It marginalizes voters’ access to the ballot box,” Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, said in a statement.

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Republicans in the Alabama Legislature had named the bill a key priority for the year and aimed to get it in place before the November election. Republicans argued a voter could still request help with actual voting, but the restrictions on absentee ballot applications was needed to combat voter fraud through “ballot harvesting,” a term for the collection of multiple absentee ballots.

An email to a spokesperson for Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen seeking comment on the lawsuit was not immediately returned Thursday morning.

“Free and fair elections are the foundation of our constitutional republic. The passage of SB1 signals to ballot harvesters that Alabama votes are not for sale,” Allen said in a statement last month after the new law was approved.

Opponents argued that there is no proof that ballot harvesting exists and called it an attempt to suppress voting by absentee ballot.

A federal judge in June blocked a Mississippi law from taking effect that named a short list of people who can “collect and transmit” an absentee ballot. The judge wrote that the Mississippi law violates the Voting Rights Act, a federal law that says any voter who is blind, disabled or unable to read may receive assistance “by a person of the voter’s choice.”