In clear violation of the Voting Rights Act, the State of Alabama has proposed a set of rules that will require an otherwise eligible voter who lacks the required photo identification to prove his or her identity by the “voucher” of a class of mostly white poll officials.
“It is deeply problematic that Alabama’s Secretary of State is trying to resurrect an unconstitutional and illegal relic of the Jim Crow South,” said Ryan P. Haygood, Director of the Political Participation Group at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “Discriminatory voucher tests, which Congress explicitly banned along with literacy tests when it passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, have no place in modern day Alabama,” Haygood added.
The Alabama Secretary of State’s proposed rules would require a voter without photo identification to show that he or she is personally acquainted with an election official in order to vote.