The Montgomery County Board of Registrars said Tuesday that 4,600 voters in Montgomery County received incorrect information about which congressional district they resided in ahead of Tuesday’s primary election.
Zane Snipes, chair of the Montgomery County Board of Registrars, said Tuesday that postcards reminding people of their voting precincts and districts misidentified people as living in the 7th Congressional District instead of the 2nd Congressional District.
“A certain number of days before the primary, we wanted to print postcards of all the active and inactive voters of Montgomery County, primarily to tell them they were all in District 2,” Snipes said. “Somewhere within our fixing of the system, we just had a computer glitch, or a software glitch, that picked on about 4,000 voters.”
A portion of Montgomery County was in the 7th Congressional District until last fall, when a federal court approved new congressional maps that put the whole county in the 2nd Congressional District.
Snipes estimated the postcards were sent around Jan. 15. He said the Board of Registrars realized the error on Jan. 23, fixed the computer glitch and updated their systems so that voters are listed in the correct district.
Snipes said the Board of Registrars plan to mail some 6,600 postcards to voters indicating their correct voting district in several days. That doesn’t necessarily address the issue of sending incorrect information during the initial mailing, but Snipes added there were other efforts made to ensure people had the correct information.
“We did publish in the newspaper twice, last week and the week before, a list of all the voters active and inactive in Montgomery County, showing their correct polling places and their correct congressional districts,” he said.
The error became a point of dispute between the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Alabama Secretary of State’s office on Monday.
The SPLC identified the error in a Monday statement and said the vast majority of voters it identified as affected by the error were Black. SPLC said it did not know how many voters received incorrect information.
The organization blamed Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen for the mix-up, saying the office had the major responsibility to keep rolls updated.
“Alabama voters deserve better from our leaders and accountability — Secretary Allen needs to own up to this mistake,” said Tafeni English-Relf, director of the SPLC’s Alabama state office. “I encourage every Alabama voter to double-check their congressional district and other election information as soon as possible.”
The Secretary of State’s Office Monday rejected that.
“The Alabama Secretary of State’s office has not sent any mailers to any residents of Alabama informing them of a change in their assigned voting district,” said Laney Rawls, executive assistant and director of scheduling at the Alabama Secretary of State’s Office. “Any suggestion to the contrary is erroneous, and should be retracted immediately. Any mailer sent to Montgomery County voters regarding a change in their assigned voting precinct would have been sent by the Montgomery County Board of Registrars or the Montgomery County Election Center.”
Messages seeking comment were left with Montgomery County Probate Judge J.C. Love on Monday and Tuesday.
Alabama’s congressional maps were redrawn after The Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling determining the map drawn by the state legislature back in 2022 violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act by packing Black voters into Alabama’s 7th Congressional District.
The redrawn 2nd Congressional District spans the southern half of Alabama’s Black Belt. There are 11 Democrats and seven Republicans running for their respective parties’ nominations.
