In an effort to collect information on voters and to register citizens to vote Republican, apparently, the Alabama Republican Party has been mailing out voter registration forms to residents of the state with a Republican Party return address rather than the Board of Registrars address, according to an announcement posted on the Secretary of State’s office Website.

Rather than reprimanding Republican Party officials for this obvious ethical and possibly legal breach, however, Secretary of State Beth Chapman, a Republican, had this notice published on the site:

The Secretary of State’s Office has recently learned that a voter registration form has been mailed to some Alabama residents by a state political party. These registration forms have a return address for the Alabama Republican Party, rather than the local Board of Registrars. The Secretary of State has advised the county Boards of Registrars to process these completed forms as they would any other voter registration forms they receive.

Newly registered voters should receive a certificate of registration from their local Board of Registrars. You may check your voter registration status by going to www.alabamavotes.gov.

If you have filled out a voter registration form but do not receive a certificate of registration from your local Board of Registrars, please contact your county Board of Registrars to verify that your voter registration form has been received and processed. Telephone numbers for these local offices are located on the Elections link of the Secretary of State’s website at www.sos.alabama.gov.

If you have any questions regarding voter registration please contact your local Board of Registrars or please contact the Secretary of State’s Elections Division at 1-800-274-8683.

We certainly have some questions about this, so we called the number and left a message, then called the main number, and got transferred around to several people, including the elections division, which referred us to a number for a public affairs office, which is supposed to handle press inquiries. Our call has still not been returned.

Of course the Republican Party is trying desperately to take over the Alabama Legislature in the election cycle of 2010. Maybe this is part of an effort to aide and abet that effort, you think?

An attorney in Montgomery said the practice described is sort of like the situation with ACORN being bashed by the Republican Party nationally. Not sure how that works, but we urge anyone interested in finding out why the Secretary of State is aiding and abetting the Republican Party’s efforts to call the number and see if they will answer your questions. Maybe a flood of phone calls will break the logjam here.

We also tried to get in touch with a few Alabama Democrats to get their thoughts on this, but interestingly, they can’t seem to be reached for comment either. Guess they are too busy posting Bible verses on Facebook or working on their own legal defenses to get involved. Alabamaland. What a state, eh?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Alabama Politics, GOP Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.