Voters return to their car after voting at Optimist Park on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024 in Huntsville, Ala. (Eric Schultz for Alabama Reflector)
Voting rights groups Friday dropped a lawsuit against Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen over a voter purge program that targeted immigrants.
Danielle Lang, a senior director of voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, one of the groups that sued Allen, said in an interview Friday afternoon that there was no settlement, but their “understanding is that Secretary Allen has no plans to reimplement the process that we sued over.”
Allen also touted the dismissal in a press release Friday evening as a win, crediting President Donald Trump for dismissing a couple hours a companion lawsuit from U.S. Department of Justice later that said the program was rolled out too close to Election Day.
“I am incredibly pleased to announce that President Trump’s USDOJ has filed to dismiss this case and that the liberal organizations involved have followed suit,” Allen said in the statement, although DOJ’s dismissal came about two hours after the plaintiff’s.
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Last August, Allen’s office said that over 3,000 registered voters in the state had been assigned “noncitizen identification numbers” by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The office directed local boards of registrars to deactivate those individuals and begin the process of removing any non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.
The Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, the League of Women Voters of Alabama, the Alabama Conference of the NAACP and four affected voters filed suit against Allen in September, saying that Allen’s action violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution for discriminating against naturalized citizens.
U.S. District Court Judge Anna Manasco blocked Allen’s purge in October, ruling it violated the National Voter Registration Act. Manasco agreed with the DOJ, saying that Alabama violated the law’s requirements that bars significant voter roll changes within 90 days of a federal election. During a hearing, she indicated that errors in the state’s list — including potentially naturalized citizens — could affect the case’s outcome.
Manasco in late December put the case on hold at the request of both the voting rights advocates and the state. Voting rights advocates said they hoped to negotiate a settlement. The state saying they may develop a different program in 2025.
Lang said their clients would be “looking closely” at any new process Allen may develop.
“And if there’s a new process, that will demand a new lawsuit if it, in fact, runs afoul of the law the way the old one did,” Lang said.
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