- Oct 17, 2011
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[Republican poll worker] Martin insisted [state GOP leader John] Wahl and his extended family show photo IDs like everybody else when they voted.
And as a result, Martin isn’t a poll worker anymore.
Most of the facts of this story are not in dispute. Martin and Wahl give similar accounts, as do others. The differences turn on motivations.
It's kind of a complex situation. Let me try to sum up a bit of it.
Alabama has a voter ID law.
The Wahl family are Anabaptists who do not like having their photographs taken.
Alabama's voter ID law has no exception for religion.
But, you can vote without ID if the poll worker can swear an affidavit that he knows you and knows you are a registered voter.
According to state voter records, eight of the Wahl family members living on their farm are registered to vote. Martin says he knows some of the Wahls but not all of them, and he wasn’t comfortable swearing an affidavit that he could “positively identify” them all as registered voters, as required under the law before signing an affidavit.
So because the poll worker was trying to obey Alabama law and protect the validity of the election, some of the Wahl family have been unable to vote. John Wahl did vote, because he produced photo ID of a sort.
However, it appears that he made the ID himself. And the Secretary of State has ruled that it is invalid for use as voter ID.
Alabama GOP chairman made the photo ID he used to vote
... the last few times Alabama Republican Party Chairman John Wahl voted, he presented poll workers with an ID they’d never seen before.
To someone who had never seen a state employee ID, it could be mistaken for one.
But it wasn’t. It bore a state seal, a barcode and Wahl’s picture. The badge said Wahl was a media representative for State Auditor Jim Zeigler.
But when I asked the Alabama Department of Finance, which administers employee IDs, that department said it had never issued him one, nor was Wahl on the list of employees, past and present, in Zeigler’s office.
As it turns out, Wahl made the ID, he says, with Zeigler’s permission.