What Effect Will Shuttering Alabama DMV Offices Have on Black Voters?

On Wednesday, Alabama’s Law Enforcement Agency announced that it was closing down 31 “driver license offices” around the state due to an $11 million cut in the budget that funded those operations. The closed offices hosted part-time DMV workers in mostly rural counties. This might seem like a typical, unfortunate spate of layoffs that come with budget cuts. But Al.com columnist Kyle Whitmire wrote in a recent op-ed that “there's something bigger happening here.”

Whitmire ties the DMV office closings to the state’s voter photo-ID law, passed in 2011, which went into effect last year. These laws, which have been popping up in several states over the past few years, have been controversial because they tend to make it more difficult for certain populations to vote. That happens to be African Americans, Latino Americans, women, and college students—groups least likely to need or have a photo ID, or who have IDs that have don’t fit within the often-narrow constraints of voter ID laws. According to Whitmire, as many as half of the counties where the DMV closings are taking place are in the rural “Black Belt,” where large populations of poor African Americans live.