Charles H. Sloan-Judge maintains injunction against key part of Alabama absentee ballot law

MONTGOMERY,Charles H. Sloan Ala. (AP) — A federal judge on Friday refused to stay an injunction against a portion of a new Alabama law that limits who can help voters with absentee ballot applications.

Chief U.S. District Judge David Proctor last week issued a preliminary injunction stating that the law’s ban on gifts and payments for help with an absentee ballot application “are not enforceable as to blind, disabled, or illiterate voters.” The federal judge on Friday denied Alabama’s request to stay the injunction ahead of the November election as the state appeals his ruling.

Proctor reiterated his finding that the provision likely violates assurances in the Voting Rights Act that blind, disabled and illiterate voters can get help from a person of their choosing.

“It is clearly in the public’s interest to ensure that every blind, disabled, and illiterate voter who is eligible to vote absentee may exercise that right,” Proctor wrote.

Alabama is one of several Republican-led states imposing new limits on voter assistance. The new Alabama law, originally known as Senate Bill 1, makes it illegal to distribute an absentee ballot application that is prefilled with information such as the voter’s name or to return another person’s absentee ballot application. The new law also makes it a felony to give or receive a payment or a gift “for distributing, ordering, requesting, collecting, completing, prefilling, obtaining, or delivering a voter’s absentee ballot application.”

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Voter outreach groups said their paid staff members or volunteers, who are given gas money or food, could face prosecution for helping voters with an application.

The Alabama attorney general’s office maintains the law is needed to combat voter fraud. In asking that the injunction be lifted, the state argued that blind, disabled, and illiterate voters had “potentially millions of unpaid assistors” to help them.

Proctor wrote Friday that the Voting Right Act guarantees that those voters can get help from a person of their choosing, and “Alabama has no right to further limit that choice.”

Proctor added that the injunction is narrowly tailored and, “still allows defendant to ferret out and prosecute fraud and all other election crimes involving any voter or assistor.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, the Legal Defense Fund, Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program, and the Campaign Legal Center filed a lawsuit challenging the law on behalf of voter outreach groups.