The son of a notable Alabama civil rights activist was indicted on charges related to voter fraud on Wednesday, undercutting claims by leftist organizations and corporate media that legitimate concerns about the issue are unfounded.
According to Advance Local, an Alabama news outlet, Perry County Commission Chairman Albert Turner Jr. has been charged by Fourth Judicial Circuit District Attorney Michael Jackson and Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill “with voting more than once, which is a misdemeanor, and harvesting ballots, a felony.” The alleged incidents occurred during two separate elections in May and November of last year.
As noted in the report, Jackson revealed how several witnesses claimed they saw Turner “stuffing filled out ballots in favor of the candidates he was supporting” into a voting machine during the county’s May 2022 Democrat primary election. Regarding the November contest, Jackson said Turner has been, as Advance Local described, “accused of mailing an undisclosed number of absentee ballots.”
“Since January 19, 2015, we have worked extraordinarily hard to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat in Alabama,” Merrill said. “While the accused is innocent until proven guilty, it is important to know that this incident … will receive the full attention of this office as we confirm for the people for the State of Alabama that we are the gold standard for election administration in the United States.”
Merrill and Jackson did not indicate which particular races Turner has been accused of meddling in nor whether those alleged actions could have affected any election’s outcome.
While Turner’s alleged crimes present a striking example of problems with the integrity of U.S. elections, the story will almost assuredly be ignored by Democrat-friendly nonprofits and corporate media. For years, such entities have worked overtime to dismiss concerns related to fraud and ballot harvesting.
In 2018, for instance, The Washington Post ran a lengthy article lamenting Republican-backed voter ID laws as a form of voter suppression and castigating voter fraud as “extremely rare in recent elections.”
“The real problem with American elections is not voter fraud but abysmally low turnout that ranks the United States near the bottom of peer democracies,” the diatribe reads. “The many forms of voter suppression now in place could have an effect on the outcome of the [2018] midterm elections, with many House, Senate and gubernatorial races decided by a handful of votes.”
Left-wing nonprofits such as The Center for American Progress have also gone to war against Americans concerned about election integrity issues. In 2016, the group published an article titled, “Voter Fraud Isn’t Real—But Voter Suppression Is a Grave Danger,” in which the authors bemoan how the “toxic myth of voter fraud is used to justify real voter suppression that costs citizens their voices in democracy.”
While there’s been ample evidence of fraud, irregularities, and other rigging in recent elections, there’s also been historic numbers of people voting, putting to bed false narratives that so-called rampant voter suppression is killing democracy.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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