Feb. 17—Alabama Senate Republicans approved legislation limiting the assistance available to absentee voters Tuesday, Feb. 13. The bill’s sponsor, local delegate Sen. Garlan Gudger, said the bill is designed to protect election integrity within the state, but opponents argued that the bill is, at its best, unnecessary and has the potential to discourage voter participation.

The Alabama Senate approved SB1 with a 27-8 partisan vote on Tuesday. It will now move to the Alabama House of Representatives.

A similar bill was introduced during the 2023 legislative session which nearly eliminated any assistance for those voting by absentee ballot, but was not brought up for a vote. The current, revised version, sponsored by Gudger, will allow for voters to designate a person of their choosing as long as the assistance is needed due to blindness, a disability or an inability to read or write. Exemptions are also included for those voting under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act and those responding to out-of-state emergencies.

Gudger said the bill is designed to protect the state from “ballot harvesting,” which he said involves groups seeking to profit from the absentee voting process.

“SB1 will help strengthen Alabama’s absentee voting process while protecting voters who are disabled and protecting our overseas military voters. SB1 will make it illegal to pay or receive payment to assist voters in completing an absentee ballot application or absentee ballot,” Gudger told The Times via text message.

The legislation would make it a misdemeanor to return someone else’s absentee ballot application or distribute applications prefilled with a voter’s name or other information. It would become a felony to pay a person or receive payment to “distribute, order, request, collect, prefill, complete, obtain or deliver a voter’s absentee ballot application.”

Senate Minority Leader Bobby Singleton said these steep penalties would reduce the state’s already weak voter turnout.

“We live in a participatory democracy. We don’t live in a dictatorship. We don’t live where people have to say ‘Hey, can I go vote today?’ and you tell them no. We want people to come out and vote because every time somebody loses they talk about ‘Shoot, people just stay at home, no voter turnout, people didn’t even vote.’ But this is making it harder for them to vote because they’ll get scared,” Singleton said.

President of the League of Women Voters of Alabama Kathy Jones said she is also concerned that, what she described as “the bill’s confusing language” would make it less likely that people would reach out to the group for help.

Jones said LWVA is made up of volunteers with the common goal of increasing community participation in government. She said the group regularly educates voters on their voting rights and, when asked, will assist people with filling out absentee ballot applications. There have even been instances when someone would approach a member to ask if they could make a copy of their I.D. to send in with their ballot application.

This kind of work was important, Jones said, because many eligible voters — especially younger students away at college and senior citizens — don’t participate in elections simply because they aren’t informed about the process. She said SB1 would make a fairly large percentage of that work illegal.

“Our members are volunteers. We’ve got people who are teachers, nurses and caregivers. They can’t afford to have to have a misdemeanor on their record. We’re worried that the people who need it will be afraid to ask for help and people will be afraid to offer help,” Jones said.

Dr. Enrijeta Shino, Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Alabama, has published multiple papers based on her research into elections and voting behavior. She said the absentee voting process already has robust safeguards in place to protect against voter fraud. The main problem she has found with mail-in ballots is the number of legitimate votes that are disqualified because current laws are overly restrictive.

“Mail-in voting is a safe method of voting. It is difficult for rightful absentee ballots to be counted, just because the signatures may not match perfectly, let alone lead to significant fraud,” Shino said.

Gudger however, maintained there was evidence to suggest voter fraud had occurred in recent elections and points to a handful of counties within Alabama’s black-belt where the percentage of absentee votes have been consistently higher than the state’s average.

Alabama did not begin consistently tracking absentee votes until 2020, but in each election after the 2020 General Election the number of statewide absentee ballots have been between three and five percent. Four Democratic led counties — Bullock, Lowndes, Perry and Wilcox — have maintained significantly higher percentages which at times have reached near 20%.

“Do we really think that one in five votes are absentee in some counties? Doubtful,” Gudger said. “A 400 to 500% increase from the state’s average of absentee voting could be an indication of fraud.”

Based on Shino’s research, she said those numbers weren’t surprising after looking at national voting trends during post-pandemic elections. She said in Florida the majority of mail-in ballots had historically been cast by Republican voters, but those trends started after former President Donald Trump began casting doubt on the mail-in voting process in 2016. “Pre-2020 Republicans used absentee voting at a higher rate than Democrats, but when Trump started saying that mail-in voting would rig the election, that rhetoric from the party discouraged Republican voters to vote by mail, but they followed Trump’s lead,” Chino said. “Democrats were encouraging their base to vote by mail in 2020 while Republicans were doing the opposite.”

Alabama House Representative Thomas Jackson represents both Perry and Wilcox counties. He said poor, Black voters in these counties have suffered from GOP gerrymandering to the point where absentee voting was one of the last ways they were able to elect a candidate of their choosing.

“They [Republicans] are adamantly trying to take away the voting process, not just in the state of Alabama, but the nation. It’s only been about 60 years since Black people and other minorities have been able to vote. In a Democratic Republic such as ours we ought to welcome the process rather than making it harder for the citizens to participate. We should make it easier for everyone who is eligible to do so,” Jackson said in an emailed response to The Times. “Living in rural areas, where precincts have closed and been moved miles away has caused problems for the voting poor. Thanks to the absentee voting process, these citizens have been allowed to continue to exercise their citizenship rights. We have been gerrymandering so much until it’s hard to elect the candidate of our choice … I don’t feel that people should be disenfranchised because of their economic situation. This is America, home of the free because of the brave. Let the people vote! Give them the ballot box.”

Singleton expressed the same concerns as Jackson on Tuesday and hoped to see the state begin to loosen its voting restrictions.

“We don’t have a democracy without the right to vote. That’s what’s so cool about America. That’s why I love this country and that’s why I love this state. Alabama is the greatest state out of all 50, but we cannot hold Alabama back,” Singleton said. “We’ve got to move forward. We’ve got to start looking out of our windshield instead of our rearview mirror. Let’s move forward. Let’s open up elections. Let’s get Saturday voting and early voting. Let’s allow people to have free access to the poll and you’ll start to see a different democracy here in this state. That’s what we should be doing instead of trying to put penalties on people for doing something to just be able to exercise their right to vote. We’re wrong on this one.”