Very interesting opinion article in the Montgomery Advertiser by former Congressman Artur Davis on why he backs Alabama’s voter identification law. He voted against such measures in the House but has changed his mind. What’s most interesting about the piece is his description of ballot box stuffing in some of Alabama’s black-majority Black Belt rural counties. Here’s what he wrote:
“The truth is that the most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African American community, at least in Alabama, is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt.
“Voting the names of the dead, and the nonexistent, and the too-mentally-impaired to function, cancels out the votes of citizens who are exercising their rights — that’s suppression by any light. If you doubt it exists, I don’t; I’ve heard the peddlers of these ballots brag about it, I’ve been asked to provide the funds for it, and I am confident it has changed at least a few close local election results.”
Davis should know whereof he speaks: he represented some of these counties in his four terms in the House, but he was opposed by Alabama’s liberal black organizations when he ran for governor in 2010 and lost the Democratic primary 62%-38%.
