Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill recently spoke to the St. Clair County Young Republicans gathered in Pell City about his office and issues of election security.
“Henry Hitchcock was our first of 53 Secretaries of state in Alabama,” Merrill told the group.
Merrill said that while elections and campaign finance review is what the office is best known for, “Business services is over 65% of what we do. When we started (7 and a half years ago), we had 49 employees in that office, and they were six to seven months behind on filings. Today we have 36 team members, and they handle their filings on the day that they are filed. We are not moving at the speed of government anymore. We are moving at the speed of business.”
The Secretary of State’s office oversees Alabama elections.
“One of the things that I concentrate on is making sure that every citizen who is eligible to vote has the opportunity to vote,” Merrill said. “As of today, we have 3,681,000 registered voters in the state of Alabama. Per capita, no state has done what we have.”
“96% of all eligible Black citizens in the state of Alabama are registered to vote. 91% of all eligible White citizens in the state are registered to vote.”
In the last year and a half, Merrill said that many people had asked him what the Republicans did wrong in the 2020 election – where Donald Trump narrowly lost the presidency to Joe Biden.
“When I was chairman of the Republican Secretaries of State in 2020 and 2021, some of the suggestions I made were listened to, and most were not,” Merrill said. “Karl Rove and Ronna McDaniel asked me to chair a commission,” looking at how elections could be improved.
Merrill explained that there are “Five pillars.”
1. Empower the states
2. We believe we have to make sure that only U.S. citizens are added to the voter rolls
3. We believe the gold standard is in-person voting on election day with a voter ID
4. If you have a vote-by-mail component, you have a copy of your photo ID
5. When the vote occurs, that is the end of it. It is election day, not election week, election months, or election season.”
“We have removed more than 1.5 million voters from the rolls because they moved away, passed away, or were put away (in prison),” Merrill said.
Merrill said that he has a line of communication with Trump and the Trump organization.
“I went to Mar-A-Lago a year ago,” Merrill said. “I am going back down to see him in the next couple of weeks.”
Merrill said that Alabama’s voting machines are not hackable.
“A lot of people know that none of our election equipment, our tabulators, are able to transmit data to the internet,” Merrill explained. “We had them built to a standard so that there are no modem components so that there is no internet connectivity. The only exception is for military servicemen and women. They can go to a secure website, and they can vote electronically. The reason I am not ever concerned about that being hacked is that they have secure military email accounts. We know who they are and where they are. That is an option we get our people. We led the nation in military voting in 2016.”
“We provided every county a computer that is brand new – a hardened computer with preloaded data,” Merrill explained. “They can’t upload data.”
Merrill said that the numbers that appear on TV on election night come from the Secretary of State’s office but do not include the official total. “That comes the next week,” Merrill explained.
Merrill said that there were mistakes made during the primaries in four counties: Etowah, Calhoun, Lauderdale, and Limestone, where voters did not receive the correct ballots for their legislative districts.
“There were people impacted,” Merrill admitted. “It happened in four counties. We actually terminated the registrars that were involved in those races.”
“We had a race in Limestone County where somebody felt they were cheated,” Merrill said. “They missed being in the primary runoff by 14 votes. We don’t really know what would have happened,” if those voters had gotten the correct ballots.
Merrill praised Chairman Paul Manning. “St. Clair county is a very fiscally sound county thanks to the leadership of Chairman Manning,” Merrill said. “While other counties are not so fiscally sound, and some counties can afford things that others can’t. The Secretary of State’s office tries to keep the voting equipment on an equal footing between the counties.”
Merrill recalled when he first became Secretary of State.
“We passed 16 pieces of legislation in the first year I was there,” Merrill said. “They had not passed six pieces of legislation in the previous ten years. We have passed over 50 pieces of legislation since then.”
Merrill said that the Census made a number of mistakes in the 2020 census that are impacting congressional representation and are going to affect the 2024 electoral college vote.
“California should have lost two electoral votes,” Merrill said. “Number two is Texas, who was undercounted.”
“Alabama has been growing at a 5% clip since about 1970, but we are not growing at the same rate as the rest of the country. Georgia used to be about the same population as Alabama. Today, the Atlanta metropolitan area has more population than our entire state, and that impacted the 2020 election. Trump won 145 of the 159 counties in Georgia but lost the state.”
“New York should have lost two more seats, but there is nothing that Congress can do,” Merrill said.
There are ten amendments on the Tuesday ballot. Merrill said that the most important amendment is to vote for Amendment One – Aniah’s law. Merrill also urged voters to vote to ratify the recompiled state constitution; because it removes the racist language and reorganizes the state constitution so that similar issues are all near each other,
Young Republican of St. Clair County Chairman Logan Glass thanked Merrill for speaking to the group and said he was a personal inspiration.
Merrill is term-limited, so he cannot run again.
The next Secretary of State will be determined by the voters on Tuesday. Republican nominee Wes Allen, Democratic nominee Pamela Lafitte and Libertarian nominee Matt Shelby are the three candidates.
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