I honestly don’t know what to think about this:
When Alabama’s voter ID was before the state Legislature, if I had come up with a hypothetical like the Wahl family, the proponents of that bill would have rolled their eyes and told me to stop being ridiculous.
And I don’t know what I would have argued back.
What about people who have a religious objection to having their pictures taken? Wouldn’t photo ID leave them disenfranchised?
Such a thing seems unlikely.
And it would have been beyond most folks’ imaginations that, just a few years later, a member of such a family, John Wahl, could navigate Republican Party politics to become the state GOP chairman and speak in favor of the very law that has vexed members of his own family at the polls.
If it were fiction, it would have to be satire. Because no one would believe it.
And as I learned after spending two months digging into this story — filing public information requests, conducting interviews, querying online databases of public records — much of what I was looking for was sitting in a court file the whole time.
For me, it was like deciphering all the hieroglyphics in Egypt only for someone to hand me the Rosetta Stone after I was done.
In 2015, John Wahl’s oldest brother, Joshua, approached the NAACP which was fighting the photo ID law in court, and in February of 2016, he sat for a deposition, giving sworn testimony under oath about how the law had affected his family.
That deposition and other records in the court file show that the Wahls have struggled for years to vote in Limestone County going back to 2014, the year voter ID became law in Alabama.
John Wahl said that he knew his brother took part in a deposition but that was the extent of what he knew.
“I have no information on a deposition,” he said. “I was not there. I’ve never seen the deposition. So I have no comment.”
Religious objection to photo ID
John Wahl has said his extended family, which lives together on a farm west of Athens, has a background in Anabaptism.
When asked by lawyers for the state, his brother Joshua said only that they were Christians, although he recognized that his beliefs were different from others.
His objection to voter ID, Joshua Wahl said, was that he believed all biometric identification, including photos that could be used for facial recognition programs, to be the mark of the beast foretold in Revelation.
“In particular, I object to the biometric nature of IDs in Alabama which started pursuant to the REAL ID Act,” Joshua Wahl testified. ” And there’s a passage in Revelations 12 where it says that the forthcoming mark of the beast will be a number of a man. Biometrics by its nature is a number of a man. You know, that’s what makes me uncomfortable, and that goes against my convictions.”
Joshua Wahl also testified that he did not have a Social Security number.
Throughout his testimony, Joshua Wahl said that his family generally shared his beliefs but that they varied.
“Some of them do, and some of them don’t,” he said when asked whether the rest believed photo IDs were the mark of the beast.
Only one sibling had a photo ID, he said. He didn’t say which one.
Joshua Wahl followed the bill as it passed through the Legislature, and after it passed into law, his family attempted to use an exception to vote without ID. Under Alabama law, you can vote if two elections officials sign an affidavit saying you don’t have ID on your person and that they can positively identify you as a registered voter.
In 2014, the Wahl family was able successfully to do this once, but when they returned to the polls later that year, poll workers rebuffed their requests.
While the Wahls expected poll workers to positively identify each of them as registered voters, in his deposition, Joshua Wahl had trouble remembering those poll workers by name. He remembered the full name of one of the poll workers who had dealt with them but could only remember the last name of another.
He also testified that he learned later that sheriff’s deputies had been called to the polling place, but he said their dispute with poll workers had not been hostile and that his family left without voting before those deputies arrived.
By 2016, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill intervened after a member of the Wahl family reached out to him for help. Joshua Wahl said he didn’t know which member of their family had reached out, but Merrill has since told me that it was John Wahl.
In another deposition in that case, Merrill described the situation in Limestone County and explained the solution he had proposed — that the probate judge allow the Wahls to meet the poll workers during a poll worker training session so they could positively identify them on Election Day.
Joshua Wahl testified that such a meeting had been scheduled but it was canceled after poll workers had apparently relented.
Merrill also testified that he supported adding a religious exemption to Alabama’s voter ID in feb, but the bill adding such an exception, sponsored by state Rep. Kerry Rich, R-Albertville, died in the Legislature and never became law after Rich said the exemption wouldn’t apply to Muslims.
For a time Merrill’s intervention worked. We know now that those poll workers moved on and the Wahl family incurred the same problems with new ones who came later.
This week, Merrill told me he would do the same for any voters in the Wahls’ situation, but the Wahls’ problems were the only instance he could remember where he had to intervene.
In his deposition, Joshua Wahl said he appreciated Merrill’s intervention and called him a decent person, but he still took issue with the law.
“Secretary of State Merrill was really great in trying to solve the problem, but relying on one person is not a solution,” he testified. According to Joshua Wahl, the law gives poll workers ultimate discretion and poll workers would be subjective. Merrill, he said, wouldn’t always be there to lend them support.
“He’s not going to be in office forever, so the law needs to treat everyone fairly, in my opinion,” he said.
The law, as it was, would always leave room for discrimination. Whether or not someone like him and his family would get to vote would come down to the discretion of the handful of workers at the polls.
“If I just leave whether or not you get to vote up to five people, I mean, don’t you think that that has potential for discrimination?” he asked the attorneys questioning him.
Differing views
When asked about it last week, John Wahl said again that he blames the poll workers, not the law, for disfranchising his family.
“I’m sure I’m not the only person who may have different views from other members of his family,” he said.
Regardless of whether the law or the poll workers were to blame, state voting records show his family was disenfranchised.
In November 2018, all eight Wahls voted in the general election, but after that, most of them stopped.
Since 2018, only John and his father, who uses an old employee ID from the Redstone Arsenal, have voted consistently, although John Wahl appears to have skipped the 2020 presidential preference primary. Joshua voted in the 2020 general election, but that’s it in the last four years, at least in state elections. The state voter file does not track participation in local elections.
The rest of his family — including his mother and brother who have served on the state Republican Executive Committee — were either turned away or stayed home. State voting records show they didn’t vote.
The lawsuit against Alabama’s voter ID law made its way through the federal courts. On April 9, 2021, the 11 Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the state.
“No reasonable fact finder could find, based on the evidence presented, that Alabama’s voter ID law is discriminatory,” the court said.
The Alabama Republican Party’s Twitter account rejoiced in the victory.
“A big win for fair elections in Alabama coming out of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals today, the judges ruling to uphold the state’s voter ID law,” the party said.
The party’s newly elected chairman, John Wahl, tapped retweet.
They’ll happily disenfranchise themselves if it means they can keep Black people from voting.
