Alabama GOP chairman made the photo ID he used to vote

When you vote in Alabama, state law requires you to show a photo ID at the polls.

For most folks, this means a driver’s license, but other forms of government-issued ID are permitted — a military ID, a passport or a college student ID, among others, will do.

And if you don’t have any of those, the Alabama Secretary of State’s office will help you get a special voter ID. The office will even make house calls for the non-ambulatory.

But 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.

And now, the state’s top election official, Secretary of State John Merrill, says that badge is not a valid voter ID.

“It does not meet the standard of any voter ID requirements listed under 17-9-30,” Merrill said, citing where Alabama’s voter ID law appears in the State Code.

In another conversation, I told Wahl that I had concerns that his ID did not pass muster under the law.

“That’s a legitimate question,” Wahl said.

Trouble at the polls

Wahl’s extended family has had trouble for years voting near their family farm in Limestone County in north Alabama. According to Wahl, his family has a background in Anabaptism, and like Mennonites and the Amish, some of them have religious concerns about being photographed.

In a 2015 deposition, Wahls’ brother Joshua Wahl said he and others in their family believe biometric identification — including photographs that could be used by facial recognition software — is the mark of the beast foretold in Revelation.

This has caused trouble for the Wahls at the polls.

Beginning in 2014, poll workers have refused to let the Wahl family vote with a conventional ballot.

The Wahls have attempted to use an exception to the law that allows voters to cast a ballot if two poll workers sign an affidavit positively identifying them.

Frequently, though, the poll workers at the Wahls’ precinct have been reluctant to do so, and sometimes they have refused.