Wes Allen’s long project of limiting choices

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen walks toward a podium during inauguration ceremonies at the Alabama State Capitol on Monday, Jan. 16, 2023 in Montgomery, Alabama. (Stew Milne/Alabama Reflector)

Joe Biden can’t take Alabama’s nine electoral votes without a divine act defying our current political reality.

Something on the scale of seas parting and never-ending fish buffets .

An otherworldly hand would have to give Democrats superhuman energy and Republicans the despair of Pittsburgh Pirates fans. You’d also need a radical shift in the politics of Baldwin, Shelby and Limestone counties — all fast-growing, all safely Republican.

How? I don’t know. Maybe Donald Trump tells his supporters to treat immigrants with dignity and respect. Maybe he calls Baldwin, Shelby and Limestone hellhole counties .

And even then, I think the Republican wins. The state electorate is mostly white; disproportionately rural, and older than the nation as a whole. That’s wrapped deep in the state’s political DNA. And you can’t untie those protein strands in six months.

Alabama hasn’t gone blue in a presidential election since 1976. It hasn’t been a battleground since 1980, when Ronald Reagan eked out a 1.3% victory over Jimmy Carter. Donald Trump got over 60% of Alabama’s votes in 2016 and 2020. That’s all but certain to happen again.

But there are still many Alabamians — almost 850,000 four years ago — who want to vote for the Democratic nominee.

And Alabama’s secretary of state would deny them that choice.

Wes Allen told the national and state Democratic parties earlier this month that the Democratic National Convention, where Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will be formally nominated for their offices, will come after an Aug. 15 deadline to place the candidates on the ballot. The Democratic National Convention starts on Aug. 19.

“If this office has not received a valid certificate of nomination from the Democratic Party following its convention by the statutory deadline, I will be unable to certify the names of the Democratic Party’s candidates for President and Vice President for ballot preparation for the 2024 general election,” Allen wrote .

The Republican Party ran into this issue in 2020. The GOP’s National Convention took place after that year’s certification deadline of Aug. 13. So the Alabama Legislature extended the deadline to Aug. 20. Slight problem: The Republican National Convention didn’t start until Aug. 24.

But then-Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican, accepted a provisional certification from the GOP on Aug. 20. The formal certification of Trump and Vice President Mike Pence came on Aug. 27, after the convention concluded.

Naturally, Joe Biden’s campaign suggested this obvious fix, which doesn’t require a confrontation with the president of the United States.

Allen said he will not accept a provisional certification.

If this goes to court, as Biden’s campaign hinted it might, it’s unlikely that the secretary of state will prevail. Whatever Allen’s feelings, his predecessor established a way to address the problem. It’s hard to justify an accommodation for one major party but not another.

And it’s even harder to ignore which voters are most affected by Allen’s stand, whatever his intentions. Because voting in this state is racially polarized.

White Alabamians tend to favor Republicans. Black Alabamians generally support Democrats.

That’s not my opinion. That’s the conclusion of three federal judges, two of whom owe their jobs to Trump.

The panel wrote in the state’s long-running reapportionment dispute in January 2022 that there was a “veritable mountain of undisputed evidence that in all the districts at issue in this case, and in all statewide elections, voting in Alabama is polarized along racial lines.” The U.S. Supreme Court twice upheld that finding .

If it’s all but certain that Donald Trump will win Alabama in November, it’s just as certain that the vast majority of Black Alabamians will vote for Joe Biden. Allen would deny them that choice.

That seems to fit a pattern for the man charged with overseeing state elections.

As a state representative in 2020, he supported Texas’ plan to overturn election results in four states won by Biden. The following year, he passed a law banning curbside voting , something that was a big help for elderly and disabled voters. Allen also sponsored a law preventing private companies from providing funding for local election administration, a help for poorer communities.

Allen has a relentless focus on eliminating the vulnerable from the political process. He calls it election security. That appears to mean securing government from people who may disagree with him.

Now he’s targeting a person who will likely be the choice for most Black voters in Alabama.

Whether the state goes down this road depends on the Alabama Legislature. Two committees on Wednesday approved measures to extend the deadline past the Democratic convention. With six legislative days left in the session, the bills need to start moving this week to become law.

If they don’t, the state will almost certainly be back in federal court.

But it shouldn’t come to that. There is nothing to be gained in impassively watching a state official silence a quarter of Alabama’s population. You would hope lawmakers learned their lesson from attempting to do something similar last summer.

And if they haven’t? Then state taxpayers will get stuck with another needless legal bill. And we’ll have yet another sign of who Goat Hill really serves.

The presidential race in Alabama will not be competitive. But it shouldn’t be predetermined, either. And our lawmakers will soon reveal whether they support democracy or Allen’s vision of a true one-party state.

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