There’s Another Big Problem With Alabama’s Sweeping DMV Closures
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Critics say the move will prevent black residents from getting voting ID documents. But the impacts will have other consequences.
When Alabama’s Law Enforcement Agency announced last week it was cutting driver's license examiners who work at 31 part-time satellite offices around the state, the move was met with widespread condemnation because of its impacts on black voters who will have a far more difficult time obtaining documents needed to meet the state’s voter ID law passed in 2013.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who plans to visit Alabama later this month, described the cost-cutting move as "a blast from the Jim Crow past."
The decision is almost certain to prompt a legal challenge because the many of the shuttered offices are located in areas of the Alabama with majority black residents, many of them poor and unable to easily travel to other areas of the state where driver’s license services will remain open.
Alabama's secretary of state, John Merrill, has said that state officials will issue photo voter identification cards at county Board of Registrars offices and with its mobile ID van services which travel the state, according to AL.com.
Still, the closures will have other major impacts.
The offices that will remain open, many of which are already strained by regular use, are going to be even more overburdened.
In Shelby County, located near Birmingham, workers are expecting an inundation of residents from other counties seeking to apply for and renew driver’s licenses.
“We will have anywhere from 60 to 80 people lined up before the door opens on average,” said [Shelby County Manager Alex] Dudchock. “Two weeks ago we had 87 out there at 6:30. I asked out of the 87 how many of y’all live in Shelby County?”
“I had three. Three citizens out of 87 lived in our county,” he continued.
There have also been technological challenges.
As the television station reports, the facial-recognition software has had trouble distinguishing slight changes of appearance in the photo-taking process for driver’s license renewals—for instance, if somebody grew a beard, the system would sometimes reject the new photos.
In those situations, Shelby County workers processing driver’s license renewals would have to refer those impacted renewal applicants to an official state facility where driver’s licenses are processed.
While county workers are now authorized to process renewals in those situations, the county manager said he still has concerns about the need to streamline the process when more and more non-county residents use their facility to process driver’s license applications and renewals.
“Those people are going to really be pushed to other places just like us,” Dudchock said, according to WIAT-TV. “And that’s where ... it’s going to be terrible.”
Michael Grass is Executive Editor of Government Executive’s Route Fifty.
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