Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen told Troy Rotarians that election integrity was his top priority. 

Allen served as Pike County’s Probate Judge for more than nine years and also served the county as State Representative before being elected as Alabama’s secretary of state. Allen said the experiences serving as probate judge and overseeing Pike County’s elections helped prepare him for his tenure as secretary of state. 

“I believe in Election Day, not election month,” Allen said. “When you get out there and it takes you a month to count ballots? I believe, in my opinion, we do it right in Alabama and it would be well served by some of these other states that take so long to count ballots to come to Alabama and we’ll show you how we do things.”

Allen said Alabama had a good, simple process to make sure the state had solid election results that could be reported that night. He said the most important part was voter file maintenance. 

“Nothing is more important in election integrity than voter file maintenance,” Allen said. “Voter registration and voter file maintenance is the most important part. It is the foundation of where it all starts. If your voter registration and voter file maintenance gets off in the ditch, you’re going to have bad problems. That’s what we see in a lot of other states. They don’t take care in maintaining their voter file.”

Allen campaigned on removing Alabama from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). ERIC is a voter registration database that helps identify voters registered in more than one state, deceased voters and potential people who have not registered to vote. 

Allen said he didn’t believe state of Alabama voters should be shared with an out-of-state, third-party group that couldn’t be audited. Allen said the state was unable to choose what it wanted to do with the data it received from ERIC.

Allen withdrew the state from ERIC shortly after taking office in 2022. Allen said he went to Washington, D.C., after being elected and went to the address listed on the ERIC website and was told there was no office for ERIC at that location. 

“I knew we could do an Alabama-based solution that could take care of our voter file here in the State of Alabama,” Allen said. 

Allen said his office created bilateral data sharing agreements with border states, which allowed the state to create a database to replace ERIC. The Alabama Voter Integrity Database was created from the bilateral agreements as well as information from the U.S. Postal Service change of address data and a Social Security Administration database of deceased persons. 

Allen said AVID did the same job as ERIC, but the data was controlled by the State of Alabama and not a third party. 

Allen said a number of other important rules and laws had been implemented to protect election integrity. He said in Alabama a driver’s license or Social Security number is required to register to vote, Geographical Information System data was used to ensure voters were voting in the correct precincts and stopped Medicaid from sending voter registration cards to people with unverified immigration status. 

Allen said paper ballots are used in Alabama under administrative rule, and that had been changed from a rule to a state law. Allen also said it was an administrative rule to not allow vote tabulating machines to be connected to the Internet. He said that had also been changed to a state law. 

Allen said Alabama was previously ranked as No. 6 in the nation in election security in 2020. He said currently, the Heritage Foundation ranked Alabama as No. 2 in the nation. Allen said he was very proud of the ranking, but the Secretary of State’s Office was working to improve on the score. 

The Heritage Foundation ranks states on six different categories of election integrity. The maximum score is 100 points. Tennessee ranked first with 90 points and Alabama, Florida and Georgia were all tied for second with 83 points.