Election Registration 101
Making sure reporter's voting stories will be accurate.
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill briefed political reporters today, including Alabama News Network’s Tim Lennox, about issues involved in voter registration and voting.
Merrill says sometime in coming weeks he’ll be sending out a news release about a million voters being added to the registration lists since January 19, 2015, though he says some names have also been removed because of deaths or people moving out of state, He says there will be 3.3 Million voters on the rolls.
Some 400,000 names were eliminated, but Merrill said there was no evidence anyone had tried to use any of those names to file illegal v
otes. He says most of the voter fraud happens with absentee ballots.
Merrill says the state compares voter registration lists with drivers license lists, and sends notifications to residents who have a license to drive but are not registered to vote.
Alabama was ground zero for preventing African-Americans from voting in the 1960’s, but Merrill says there is no special effort by his office to register people in that demographic. He says they try to reach all eligible voters to register them. State residents can register online if they have a state drivers license. HERE is a link to that page online.
The next election day in Alabama will be runoff elections for Primary election day contests in which no candidate received 50% of the vote plus at least one more vote.
That runoff election day is July 17th.
The General election is on November 6th.
Alabama News Network is conducting Face2Face interviews with some of the runoff candidates. They’ll be airing starting next week on CBS 8 and ABC 32.
