At the end of September, Alabama announced it would close 31 part-time driver’s license offices as a result of the $11 million cut in the General Fund Budget appropriation to the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, according to a Sept. 30 WHNT News 19 article. Superficially, this may not seem particularly noteworthy: who cares if prospective drivers have to work a little harder for their licenses? 

Unfortunately, a driver’s license is much more than a mere license to drive; it is legal identification — and in Alabama, it is practically one’s voting ballot. In 2014, Alabama enacted a law requiring people to have photo IDs to vote. As with many voter ID laws before it, legislators cited the prevention of voter fraud as their justification for creating a barrier to suffrage. Blindly taken at surface value, their justification seems the noble decision to choose the lesser of two evils, but the numbers tell a different story.

 According to a 2014 article in the Washington Post, a study conducted by Professor Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School found that out of one billion ballots cast in general and primary elections from 2000 to 2014, 31 were the result of voter impersonation, the only type of fraud which voter ID laws are designed to prevent. 

That’s a miniscule fraction of one percent. On the other hand, in 2015, the State of Alabama’s Official Election Center reported that there are 2,997,340 active and inactive registered voters. Of those nearly three million voters, up to 500,000 lack driver’s licenses, the most commonly used voter ID, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the majority of those 500,000 are comprised of low-income and minority voters. 

Simply put, Alabama’s voter ID law discourages more than 16 percent of its voters from their right to political participation in order to prevent less than one percent of voter fraud incidents. As such, the ends absolutely does not justify the means.

Criticisms of the voter ID law aside, the closing of 31 offices as a result of Alabama’s new budget exacerbates a situation already unconducive to political participation. Under this new policy, residents of Alabama will have more difficulty obtaining their precious voter IDs. Low-income and black voters in particular will struggle as the office closures occurred “predominantly in rural counties with large black populations, high poverty rates and little to no public transportation,” according to Sherrilyn A. Ifill, the President and Director Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. As such, a large proportion of low-income and African-American voters — now deprived of a local driver’s license office — will struggle to obtain or renew IDs. “The state of Alabama is balancing its budget on the backs of the people who can least afford it,” Congresswoman Terri Sewell, the only Democrat to represent Alabama in Washington D.C., told ThinkProgress. “There’s no denying that the impact and effect is a disproportionate burden on low income communities. These are poor rural communities where people don’t have cars. They struggle to get to their jobs, let alone to an ID office.” 

Further, of the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters, the offices in eight of them have now closed, according to John Archibald of al.com, a local paper, and “every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed.” 

The Alabama government concedes these facts but refuses to acknowledge the disproportionate impact its decision will have on low-income and minority voters. According to ThinkProgress, in a demonstration of profound ignorance, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill addressed the issue by saying, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink … the fact that people don’t get them, that’s not our fault.”

The problem with this statement, however, is that the Alabama government is not leading any horses to water; in fact, its actions are more akin to putting up a wall around a water trough and denying certain horses access to the very water it boasts to distribute equally. But let’s assume, for a moment, that Alabama’s claims of aid have merit.

In a passive-aggressive letter, Governor Robert Bentley of Alabama tells Representative Sewell that voters in communities affected by the closures can go to mobile units charitably arranged by the state of Alabama to compensate for the closed offices. This seems a legitimate compromise — until one actually looks at the facts. 

According to alabamavoterid.com, there will be about a dozen mobile units within the next month. The mobile units do not go to all of the effected counties, and they do not stop in the same county twice in the same month. 

Further, the longest a mobile unit will be in any of the counties is four hours, but the vast majority will only last about two hours. These hours take place during the day, usually centered around lunchtime.

Bentley claims this perfunctory compromise will replace the 31 offices (each of which operated up to three days a week) with minimal burden to voters, and he isn’t entirely wrong. This change, while potentially inconvenient, will likely have minimal impact on individuals with access to transportation who are secure enough in their salary jobs to take several hours off work in the middle of the day. Unfortunately, as both the NAACP and Representative Sewell have pointed out, the majority of the effected Alabama residents do not fit that demographic. Their lower socioeconomic class will likely mean that the majority of them do not have access to reliable transportation and as many of them likely work hourly jobs, they will not be able to leave work to get an ID in the narrow timeframe allotted by this arrangement.

 As such, the majority of people affected by these office closures will not be helped by the mobile units and will still struggle to obtain a driver’s license. In fact, this has already been proven: According to ThinkProgress, as of Oct. 6th, only 29 voters had obtained IDs via mobile units during 2015 — 29 people over the course of 10 months. 

To put that number in perspective, one of the offices closing in Hunstville served 36,184 people, predominantly low-income and black voters in 2014, according to Lee Roop of al.com. That’s tens of thousands served by a single office in nearly the same amount of time as all the mobile units in the state served 29 people. So, no, Governor Bentley, the mobile units are not sufficient compensation for closing 31 offices, each of which serve tens of thousands annually.

In a letter to the Alabama executive, Ifill and the NAACP demand justification of Alabama’s apparent violation of the U.S. Constitution and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Ifill implies that if Alabama does not correct its decision, the NAACP has grounds for “immediate legal action.” 

As America heads into an election year, Alabama’s smothering of the voices of low-income and minority residents becomes increasingly alarming, and one can only hope pressures from civil rights organizations like the NAACP will push Alabama to reconsider its budget.

Ironically, just months after the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Selma march and the Voting Rights Act it precipitated, Alabama has taken a monumental step back in voting equality. Remembering the celebration, Rep. Sewell remarked, “We had 100 members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats, and we all marched across that bridge and patted ourselves on the back and said, ‘We’ve truly overcome.’ Then, we came back to Washington and did nothing.”

And then Alabama began to regress.