Wednesday on the “Rick & Bubba” radio show, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill explained how he had to defend Alabama’s voter identification law to groups like the NAACP over the past year, and how he has been successful at it.
Earlier this year, a federal judge dismissed the suit brought by Greater Birmingham Ministries, the Alabama NAACP and other individuals that claimed it violated the Voting Rights Act, and the 14th and 15th Amendments of Constitution.
Merrill spoke about how despite that ruling, he went head-to-head with NAACP Legal Defense Fund head Sherrilyn Ifill, who continued to claim that Alabama’s voter ID law prevented 188,000 people from voting. Merrill said he contended Ifill couldn’t offer a single person the law precluded from voting.
“The thing that made me so proud about that is we testified again – the two of us, Ifill and I did before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Charlotte in March of this year,” he said. “And when she brought it up again, I said, ‘You’re telling a lie. And you just need to acknowledge that because you can’t show me 188,000 people.’ Even though the judge has already ruled on this – you can’t show me 8,000. As a matter of fact, you can’t show me a person in this state that doesn’t have an ID that will allow them to participate. And if you do, give me the name of one person, we will go to their home today, and we will give them a valid ID for free.”
“And we’ve already done that multiple times throughout the state of Alabama,” Merrill continued. “We’ll continue to do it because I want each and every eligible U.S. citizen that is a resident of Alabama to be registered to vote and have a photo ID. That’s why we’ve made the effort that we’ve made. That’s why I was invited to go to Washington on Monday to testify before another group about what we’re doing to improve the elections process in Alabama.”
The ultimate goal Merrill argued was to promoting voting and deter voter fraud.
“I don’t mean to be so passionate, guys,” Merrill added. “I just want to make sure y’all understand that we don’t need people telling lies or misrepresenting what’s actually happening because again, people are entitled to their own opinion, but they’re not entitled to their own facts. All we’re trying to do is make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and is the editor of Breitbart TV.
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