Shortly after the now-former ALGOP chairman, John Wahl, entered the race for Alabama lieutenant governor, one of his primary opponents, Secretary of State Wes Allen, went on the attack. Allen called out Wahl for trying to use a "homemade fake ID" to vote in 2020.
"I've worked hard to make sure our state has the strictest voter ID laws in the country to protect our elections," Allen wrote. "My opponent, Nehemiah John Wahl, admitted he tried to vote using a homemade fake ID. We cannot be more different. I, like President Trump, support voter ID laws, while my opponent breaks them. And just when you think you've seen it all, you see this. This is why elections matter."
In a Tuesday interview on "Rightside Radio," Wahl responded to Allen's remarks, calling them "deceptive" and "disingenuous." He also went into detail on why he had used an ID that he said was approved by a probate judge.
"Look, there's nothing here that is not very simply explained," Wahl outlined. "And you have to push back immediately on the whole fake, homemade ID. Well, guys, I don't have an ID maker in my basement. I don't know where that is. Look, I love how he said I admitted to doing that. I'm like, well, I would never admit to that, because I kind of don't, can't, because I don't even know how I would do that. And look, the state auditor at the time, this all goes back to an incident, I think it was in the 2020 election cycle, where I had voted one time, I had voted with an ID from the state auditor's office, where I was working as a volunteer press secretary at the time. And that came up, and since this came out, and some of the liberal bloggers have tried to blow this up into some crazy thing, but what this was was a ... the state auditor at the time has come out and said, you know, he approved it, and it was professionally printed by a vendor. This wasn't, you know, something that was fake. It wasn't something that [was] homemade or anything."
He continued, "And so I just find these attacks very disingenuous. I find them very deceptive to the public. And I wish we could talk about substantive issues and talk about what we would stand for, maybe real policy differences, where we would be different or communicate with the public. These lies don't do anything to help the public make an informed decision. But they are that. They're misrepresentations. They're lies. You could argue about the discrepancy of whether that ID was or was not a valid ID to use at the polls."
"All I did was ask the poll worker, you know, does this work? A copy was sent to the probate judge. The probate judge said yes, and I voted. Like, all I did was ask a question. And so to blow this up and to accuse me of somehow being, you know, voter fraud. Look, I was voting in my voting precinct for my vote, my constitutional right, with an ID. Whether you want to argue whether it meets the exact standards of the law or not, this was not voter fraud. ... It was OK'd by the probate judge," Wahl concluded.
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