State Secretary of State Wes Allen testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Elections on Tuesday.
Connecticut, Louisiana, Idaho and Ohio joined Allen for the “Revisiting the 2024 Elections with Secretaries of State.
Topics discussed included early voting and mail-in voting, voter roll maintenance, voter IDs and illegal immigrants voting.
Allen said that while Alabama’s 2024 elections were conducted with the utmost election integrity, he was challenged in the cycle due to a lack of cooperation from the federal government under the Biden administration. When Allen rid the state of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), he said setting up a new system was more difficult due to federal red tape.
“First, the immediate removal of deceased voters from our voter file should be common sense,” Allen outlined. “However, obtaining access to the Social Security Administration’s National Master Death Index was absurdly time-consuming and overly burdensome. Unnecessary red tape makes it more difficult than it should be.”
Allen said the Biden administration made it impossible to gain access to noncitizen information.
“Second, my efforts to gain access to noncitizen data held by the United States Citizenship & Immigration Services, USCIS, were repeatedly denied by the previous administration,” he explained. “Fortunately, President Trump’s EO directing DHS to cooperate with states to eliminate non-citizens from our voter file will allow batch comparisons of DHS noncitizen data to our state-level voter files, allowing for the immediate removal of those who are illegally registered to vote.”
“Granting states immediate access to this data is crucial,” Allen added. “Only United States citizens should participate in our elections.”
U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Birmingham) spoke ahead of the hearing by saying that efforts to clean voter rolls and secure elections instead of expanding access to the voter box are a slap in the face to civil rights foot soldiers. She condemned Alabama’s voter integrity laws and the state’s act of removing voters flagged as “non-citizens.”
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