NPR:

YEAGER: At a press conference in Birmingham, the Reverend Jesse Jackson isn’t shy about what he thinks of the state’s move.

JESSE JACKSON: Of course it’s a new Jim Crow.

YEAGER: Jim Crow – he’s referring to the system of segregation laws once common across the South. He called on state leaders to reopen the driver’s license offices and echoed a call from Alabama’s only black representative, Terri Sewell, for the Justice Department to investigate how the closures could affect access to the polls.

JACKSON: It’s really another impediment to make voting more difficult.

ALABAMA SEC OF STATE JOHN MERRILL: The thing that we have to understand is that we’re not making it more difficult to vote. We’re making it more difficult to drive.

YEAGER: Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill is the state’s top election official. He says residents without a valid ID for voting can get a free one at every County board of registrars. He says the state has a mobile unit driving county to county to offer voter IDs. Merrill says they’ve been getting the word out.

MERRILL: This has not changed anything that we’re doing or the way that we’re doing it because we already had the most aggressive, assertive photo ID voter registration effort in the history of the state.

YEAGER: Alabama’s governor says the call for a federal investigation is ill-informed. He says the closures are not about keeping black people from voting, they’re a business decision to deal with budget cuts. Raymond Johnson teaches at Stanford University’s law school about the Federal Voting Rights Act, which is intended to make sure voters aren’t discriminated against by race. Johnson says if the Justice Department does investigate, he believes under that law, Alabama wouldn’t pass muster.

RAYMOND JOHNSON: I think they’re going to find that this is going to have a disproportionate impact upon minority voters in particular, as well as the poor.