Legislation disqualifying someone from voting if they commit a felony against an election worker during an election day is headed to the governor for her signature two weeks after it almost died in a Senate committee.

Its sponsor, state Rep. Adline Clarke, is crediting Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen’s Office for its revival and passage on the next-to-last-day of the spring legislative session. The Legislature’s annual session concludes Thursday.

“It was indeed a rare moment,” said Clarke, D-Mobile, who often has butted heads with current and past GOP secretaries of state over election-related policy including greater access to early mail-in voting, which she supports but Alabama Republicans have frowned on.

“I had no idea they would end up being a staunch advocate for the legislation,” Clarke said. “Really, as they should be. They are election officials. They are our state’s chief election officials and this bill protects them as much as the folks at the city and county levels.”

The Alabama Secretary of State’s Office was not immediately available for comment late Wednesday.

Reviving legislation

The Alabama Senate passed HB100 unanimously on Wednesday. The vote came 14 days after the Senate Judiciary Committee, on a 4-4-3 vote, seemingly killed the legislation amid concerns about potentially levying harsh punishments on angry voters engaged in verbal spats with poll workers.

The concerns expressed by Republicans during the committee meeting focused on punishing angry voters with a “crime of moral turpitude” if they are convicted of an assault for relatively minor offense such as aggressively pointing their finger in a poll worker’s chest. In Alabama, a crime of “moral turpitude” that disqualifies an individual from voting includes some of the most serious offense including murder, rape, kidnapping, sexual abuse and torture, human trafficking, terrorism, child sex abuse, etc.

Sen. Will Barfoot, R-Pike Road, opted to keep the legislation alive following the April 24 committee meeting in order to give lawmakers more time to review it. He also emphasized the legislation was not meant to create a new penalty under Alabama state law. Sen. Vivian Figures, D-Mobile, also urged her GOP colleagues to reconsider the bill by saying they “know this is something that is needed.”

Clarke said over the past two weeks, she along with Mike Jones, general counsel within the Secretary of State’s Office and a former member of the Alabama House, met with senators to discuss the bill.

“It was a matter of explaining the bill to them,” Clarke said.

Disqualifying offenses

Under HB100, if a felony is committed against the election official, which is motivated by an individual’s role as an election official, then they would be disqualified from voting.

The offense was added to a list of crimes that are part of the Felony Voter Disqualification Act.

The legislation, amended in the Alabama House last month, also added a few more felonies to that list: Aggravated stalking, domestic violence in the first and second degree, domestic violence by strangulation, compelling street gang membership, and elder abuse.

It was voted out of the Alabama House with a 95-0 vote on April 16.

The legislation, if signed by Gov. Kay Ivey, will be effective on Oct. 1, and before the Nov. 5 general election.

“This sends a message,” Clarke said. “We have to make sure just like we want our election safe and secure in Alabama, we want our election officials safe and secure for the work they do in our state.”

Growing concerns

The passage of HB100 in Alabama comes as threats about poll worker safety intensifies ahead of the presidential election. Much of the threats have occurred in presidential “swing” states like Arizona where former President Donald Trump, the current GOP presidential nominee, and his supporters have aimed baseless claims about voter fraud during the 2020 elections. Following the 2020 election, more than 60 lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies were all thrown out of court.

President Joe Biden, on Wednesday, said Trump will not accept the election result in November if he loses, calling it “dangerous” behavior from his opponent.

Polling shows that threats and harassments are a concern among election workers. One-quarter of those polled in an Election & Voting Information Center survey in 2022 said they had experienced abuse, harassment, threats as part of their jobs as election workers. An overwhelming majority of the threats are politically-based.

Thirteen states have enacted election worker protection laws since 2021, and a handful of others are weighing proposals this year to create felonies meant to protect election workers.

There have been no known incidents of violence directed at a poll worker in Alabama in recent years.

But the threats occurring elsewhere are hampering Alabama officials from recruiting enough poll workers on Election Day. Probate judges who administer elections on the county level say they are concerned over the lack of interest in working the election.

Mobile County Probate Judge Don Davis said in March that the county is experiencing difficulty in recruiting residents to work at the polls. The main reasoning for that, he and others have said, was fear of potential violence based on what someone is seeing in the media on TV or the Internet in other areas of the country.