“The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.” – H. Allen Smith

I do not think I am catching anyone off guard when I say we are living in a society where taking disputes to the courtroom is a common occurrence.

Watch “The Price is Right” or “General Hospital” when you have a free day, and count how many attorneys with catchy slogans buy advertising time. The number of Alexander Shunnarah billboards in the state has long been a running joke when discussing life in Alabama.

What I did not realize until more recent years is how much different levels of government seem to enjoy taking each other to court.

The most recent example of this came a couple of weeks ago as the U.S. Justice Department announced it was suing Alabama over recent actions taken by Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen.

Allen and his office, in coordination with county boards of registrars throughout Alabama, are in charge of maintaining a statewide voter registration database.

This database lists everyone who is registered to vote along with residents who are ineligible to register and residents whose registration is inactive until the voter verifies information about his or her voter registration.

Allen’s office issued a press release on Aug. 13 saying his office has identified 3,251 individuals registered to vote in Alabama who have been issued noncitizen identification numbers by the U.S. Homeland Security Department.

He announced in the press release he would instruct boards of registrars in all Alabama counties “to immediately inactivate and initiate steps necessary to remove all individuals who are not United States Citizens.”

The problem is the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, or NVRA, prohibits any state or local office from attempting to carry out a large-scale program focused on removing voters from the eligible voter list – an action sometimes called voter list purges – within 90 days of an election.

The idea behind the law is to prevent a state from suspending a large group of voters from being eligible right before the election and not providing them enough time to restore their voting rights.

This tactic has been used in past times when counties were in total control of voter lists without state input. The eligibility of registered voters, usually racial minority voters, was challenged by another voter setting up a procedure where the challenged voters’ eligibility would be suspended until local election officials could hold a hearing to determine their eligibility.

Local officials were often unable or unwilling to restore eligibility in time for the election, even if it was found the challenged voter was eligible to vote all along.

Currently, state-led processes of voter list purges are not illegal outside the 90-day election window. Also, it is still possible to declare voters inactive or ineligible before the voter registration list is finalized prior to an election, but it has to be done on a case-by-case basis.

The Justice Department’s claim that Allen’s action was a systematic plan to purge this set of 3,251 voters in violation of the NVRA 90-day rule seems to be hard to refute. Allen should be aware of this law even if his intentions were honorable.

Florida tried something similar in 2012, and it was struck down by the federal 11^th Circuit Appeals Court. I suspect all the voters identified by Allen will have their voting rights restored for the November election by the court system.

Of course, the bigger picture on this topic is will Alabama potentially have thousands of noncitizens voting in November? The answer is this is highly unlikely.

Often in these situations, most cases will be made up of people who have been naturalized, have a similar name and birthday as someone who is on the list, accidentally identified themselves as a noncitizen on a government form at one point, or are the victims of a clerical or computer system programming error.

Furthermore, it is high risk and low reward for undocumented residents to register and then actually vote.

All that being said, will there be noncitizens who vote in Alabama in November? Probably. Yet, the number is so miniscule, this is not a problem about which you should worry. If there was a way to know the true number of noncitizen votes, you could probably count the number on one or two hands.

I think Allen is correct when he points out the federal government is often less than cooperative in helping states to verify a voter’s citizenship whenever it is in question. At least some of the handwringing over noncitizen voting could be lessened with better communication between the feds and the states.

They will first need to stop suing each other long enough to have a discussion.