John Merrill discusses the Secretary of State’s office in a visit to St. Clair County
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
Steve Flowers: State Supreme Court often forgotten in Alabama
Our 1901 Alabama Constitution replicates the United States Constitution in designing a triumvirate of government. The Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches are designed to have separate and essentially equal powers. Although ideally, the three branches should be exclusive, over the course of history in both our state and national governments, the Executive and Legislative Branches have been intertwined in public policy matters, and the government seems to work more cohesively that way, especially when they are on congruent pages. On the federal level, our judicial arm of government sits on a separate island shrouded by a statue of the Blind Lady of Justice, and rightfully so. They are very independent and shielded from politics on the federal level. The U.S. Supreme Court is an omnipotent and private reserve of ultimate supreme power over public policy in America. Our Alabama Supreme Court is separate and powerful but is not shielded by politics. Our Supreme Court judges are elected. Most states appoint these positions. However, Alabamians have resisted any move to go from elected to appointed. Although most Alabamians could not name any of the members of the Supreme Court, they will fight to their death for their ability to go into a voting booth to elect them even though after they have done so, and they cannot remember who they just voted for or why. However, despite having to elect our judiciary, Alabamians have done a good job of electing good, well-qualified people to our appellate courts. We have nine members of the State Supreme Court, all elected for six-year terms in staggered election years. We also have a five-member Court of Civil Appeals and a five-member Court of Criminal Appeals. They are also elected for six-year terms in staggered years. All nine seats on the State Supreme Court are held by Republicans, and all 10 appellate judges are Republican. Therefore, winning the GOP Primary in the state Supreme Court races is tantamount to election in the Heart of Dixie. Seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices are men, and two are female. All are very conservative and religious in their court decisions and in their personal lives. As late as the 1990s, our Supreme Court was Democratically laden like our legislature. However, unlike our legislators, who were mostly conservatives and probably Republicans running as Democrats in name only, these Alabama Democratic Supreme Court judges were pro-plaintiff trial lawyers and anti-business. Many had been plaintiff lawyers prior to going on the court. Due to this overt bias and brazen liberal interpretation of laws and justice, we had become the laughingstock of the nation for fairytale justice that gave outrageous verdicts and judgments against every national corporation that did business in our state or even traversed through our borders. Therefore, our State Supreme Court became an eyesore for Alabama in recruiting any business or industry. Time Magazine did a feature publication entitled “Alabama Tort Hell.” Numerous business publications cautioned against not only opening plants in the state but to be leery of even passing through. Alabama was in bad need of Tort Reform. Alabama’s corporate community, as well as the national business community, decided to change things, and that began with changing our State Supreme Court from a Democratic plaintiff bastion to a Republican conservative tribunal; and they put their money where their mouth was. The business community brought in the legendary Karl Rove to orchestrate the takeover. He was successful. As mentioned, we now have a very conservative Republican nine-member State Supreme Court panel. As Rove was leaving, he imparted this nugget of advice for future races. His polling indicated that voters in Alabama prefer a Republican female candidate for a judgeship. Indeed, it is a proven fact in an Alabama appellate court race; if you place two candidates on a ballot in Alabama and neither does anything or spends any money, Jane Doe will defeat John Doe 54-46. Next week we will give you a rundown on who are the members who sit on our State Supreme Court. See you next week. Steve Flowers is Alabama’s leading political columnist. His weekly column appears in over 60 Alabama newspapers. He served 16 years in the state legislature. Steve may be reached at www.steveflowers.us.
Inside the Statehouse: Alabama leaders under 45 who affect the political arena
Steve Flowers lists several young rising stars in Alabama politics.
Iowa a carnival of democracy for media — until it went sour
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Joe Henderson: Assault on polling begins in ShameFest 2016
As we approach the home stretch of ShameFest 2016 — otherwise known as the election — we should take a moment to ponder one of the great moments the last time the nation chose a president. It was election night in 2012 and Fox News, accurately as it turned out, declared President Barack Obama had won Ohio and, thus, a second term as commander in chief. But GOP operative Karl Rove didn’t agree. He argued live on camera that his own network was wrong. He argued that his numbers told a different story, and that Mitt Romney would win. So anchor Megyn Kelly was dispatched to the Fox number-crunching room, where the people charged with making that call patiently explained why they were 99.5 percent correct on their projection. When Rove persisted, saying his calculations told a different story, Kelly asked, “Is that math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?” It was the runaway best quote of the election season. We are seeing an assault on polling again, particularly by the Donald Trump camp. At every rally, he tells the faithful that the polls are wrong and it always gets big cheers. I’ll admit this morning I did a double-take Friday morning when Rasmussen Polling showed Trump with a 43-41 percent lead nationally. Where in the world did that come from, especially when even News shows Hillary Clinton with a 7-point advantage? There are too many polls for the average voter (or, I hate to admit, the average journalist) to keep up with. And since polls show only a snapshot of the moment, no one can say with certainty who will or won’t win until all the votes are counted. So it’s really a case of which ones you trust most. I tend to believe Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com site is on the mark way more often than not. In case you’re curious, his site has a section devoted to grading the accuracy of all the polls. The ranking is based on several criteria, including the percentage of races it has called correctly. He has the Monmouth University poll at the top of a lengthy list of polls. It was one of six polls, including the ABC/Washington Post poll, to get an A-plus rating. For what it’s worth, he gives the Rasmussen poll a C-plus. Silver’s own forecast has Hillary Clinton with an 84.4 percent chance of winning the election. He gives her a 72 percent chance of winning Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Remember, though, that’s just a snapshot. The site advises it will be updating its forecasts every time new data is available until the election, because things do change. In the end, though, numbers never lie even when politicians do. ___ Joe Henderson has had a 45-year career in newspapers, including the last nearly 42 years at The Tampa Tribune. He covered a large variety of things, primarily in sports but also including hard news. The two intertwined in the decade-long search to bring Major League Baseball to the area. Henderson was also City Hall reporter for two years and covered all sides of the sales tax issue that ultimately led to the construction of Raymond James Stadium. He served as a full-time sports columnist for about 10 years before moving to the metro news columnist for the last 4 ½ years. Henderson has numerous local, state and national writing awards. He has been married to his wife, Elaine, for nearly 35 years and has two grown sons – Ben and Patrick.
