Who could vote in Alabama
Who could vote in Alabama
As important - or more so - as who voted in Alabama's special election is who did not get to vote due to their Voter ID law. The ID law is the result of the Supreme Court's decision (5-4) in Shelby County v. Holder suspending the Voting Right's Act's Section 5’s preclearance requirement. Also a factor in who was able to vote was the state's Definition of Moral Turpitude Act. That is a new law passed by the state Legislature and signed by Gov. Kay Ivey in May, 2017, which defined which convictions that would bar felons from the right to vote.
In Alabama, an estimated 118,000 registered voters do not have a photo ID they can use to vote. Black and Latino voters are nearly twice as likely as white voters to lack such documentation.
In 2016 prior to the Presidential election, Alabama had disenfranchised 286,266 voters convicted of felonies. More than half of those disenfranchised felons are black.
As a result of the Definition of Moral Turpitude Act, thousands of felons regained their voting rights, though a judge ruled the state had no obligation to notify those whose voting rights had been restored. A number of groups made a push to inform felons who could now vote of their restored rights and to register them prior to this special election.
Also, in Alabama as in eight other states from Nevada to Tennessee, anyone who has lost the franchise to vote cannot regain it until they pay off any outstanding court fines, legal fees and victim restitution. Thousands of people are unable to vote because they do not have enough money to pay those costs - unlike in forty-one states.
So, in a race in which Jones won by 20,000 votes over Moore with such a large turnout for this type of election, in addition to noting who did not choose to vote, it is also worth noting who could not vote and how that would have affected the results.