MOBILE, Alabama – The U.S. Justice Department last year pounced on a Texas law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, but the agency chose not to challenge a similar statute in Alabama,

Why?

Holly Wiseman, the civil rights enforcement coordinator for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Mobile, told the local League of Women Voters chapter at a Wednesday luncheon that she is not privy to those decisions. But she contrasted the two laws.

She said Texas has stricter requirements for the types of identification that a voter can produce, and when documentation is needed to obtain an ID, the state charges for it. In addition, she said, residents in some cases have to drive hundreds of miles to get to the registrar's office to obtain an ID.

Wiseman said Alabama's law, on the other hand, provides a photo ID for free to voters who do not have one. The state also issues copies of documents like marriage and birth certificates to voters who need them to obtain IDs.

"It's amazingly lenient in the documentation you can produce," she said.

Wiseman said examples include a driver's license, a voter identification card and student and employee IDs. Military records and school transcripts also can be used to obtain a photo ID. In addition, she added, voters are allowed to cast ballots if two elections officials sign affidavits vouching for their identity.

And whereas Texans in remote areas may have a burden traveling hundreds of miles, Wiseman said Alabama has vans visiting all 67 counties to help people in their communities obtain photo identification.

Mobile native comes home

Wiseman, a Mobile native who recently joined the U.S. Attorney's Office, has worked for the Alabama Attorney General's Office and spent two decades with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. She said one of her first cases was defending the Clinton-era motor voter law, which provides people to register to vote at the same time they apply for driver's licenses.

Gina O'Brien Finnegan, the vice president of the Mobile chapter of the League of Women Voters, said her organization invited Wiseman to speak as part of its project to study voter ID laws. She said the group may take a position on the issue later this year but so far has not done so.

"Voting rights is a key issue for the League of Women Voters," she said. "It's one of our core values that everyone be able to vote."

Thirty-four states require identification at the polls. Alabama in 2011 strengthened its law, requiring a photo ID for the first time during last summer's primaries.

The law has been controversial. Critics contend it is more likely to disenfranchise poor people and minorities, who are less likely to have valid identification. The group Empower Alabama pointed to the case of a 93-year-old World War II veteran whom elections officials in Escambia County turned away from the polls in June.

Many experts contend that in-person voter fraud – the kind that photo ID laws is designed to combat – is exceptionally rare. Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola University Law School, has said that he found just 31 allegations of fraud out of more than 1 billion votes cast since 2000.

Said Wiseman: "Voter fraud is almost nonexistent across the country. Is there any need for it (photo ID laws)? The position of the Department of Justice is no."

Double voting cited

On the other side, advocates contend the laws are necessary to ensure the integrity of elections. They point to reports like one in April that four Alabama counties had more registered voters than adult residents.

In May, former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams told the Mobile chapter of the conservative Federalist Society that "wranglers" in Perry and Hale counties have coerced voters by the hundreds to sign absentee ballots that had been filled out in advance.

Earlier this year, Election Integrity Maryland and the Virginia Voters Alliance claimed that they discovered 43,983 people registered in both states and that 164 of them appear to have cast ballots in both states during the 2012 presidential election.

Fighting Southern states of election regulations has been more difficult since the U.S. Supreme Court last year struck down a part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required officials in states with histories of racial discrimination to get advance approval from the Justice Department before making any changes to the voting system.

Critics contend that the proliferation of voter ID laws is proof that states have abused the looser regulations. But Wiseman said the government still has plenty of arrows in its quiver. She noted that the provisions struck down by the high court originally were meant to be in place for only five years.

Even with those rules gone, the Justice Department still can got to court to challenge any law enacted by any of those states – just as it can in states that were not covered by the special "preclearance" sections.

"Has anything changed since 1965 in Alabama," she asked, before answering her own question.

She said the government even when she joined the Justice Department was on precarious ground defending a law that treated some jurisdictions differently than others.

"At the time, I thought Section 4 and Section 5 were vulnerable," she said. "Twenty years later, the Supreme Court agreed."