There were fewer illegal crossover votes in last month’s Republican Senate runoff than originally estimated, probate judges told the Alabama secretary of state. Local election officials, responding to a request from Secretary of State John Merrill to review a list of 674 possible crossover voters — who voted in the GOP runoff after voting in the Democratic primary — said many of those names were errors. Jefferson County Probate Judge Alan King said none of the 380 names identified in Jefferson County were crossover votes. King said the party affiliations were marked incorrectly or were incorrectly listed as voting. “We ended up having zero crossover votes,” King said. “As far as I am concerned in Jefferson County, there is no issue here anymore,” King said. Montgomery County Probate Judge Steven Reed told the Montgomery Advertiser that at least 14 of the 34 names identified in Montgomery County were scanning errors and were not crossover votes.
“To say this is much ado about nothing would be a dramatic understatement,” Reed told the newspaper.
A new state law – used for the first time in the Senate runoff – prohibits voters from voting in one party’s primary and then crossing over to cast a ballot in the other party’s primary runoff. State lawmakers this spring approved the crossover ban in an attempt to prevent voters of one political party from trying to meddle in another party’s runoff, although there is a dispute about how much that actually happens. The bill approved by lawmakers this spring did not mention a specific penalty for violations, but added crossover voting to the list of felony voting fraud crimes, such as voting twice.
Full Article: Fewer crossover voters than estimated | The Herald.