(CN) – As poll watchers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund monitored the special election Tuesday for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, they found voters running into trouble casting their ballots because of a state law requiring citizens to show a photo ID to vote.
Poll workers were said to be thrown off by recently married women carrying photo IDs with names that didn’t match the names on the voter rolls, or by voters who showed up with their hair cut and dyed differently than the picture on their ID.
In Mobile, Ala., poll workers were telling voters that the address printed on their IDs had to match the address listed on the voter rolls – which is not a requirement under Alabama law, according to Deuel Ross, a civil rights attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
On Tuesday, former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, a Democrat, narrowly beat embattled former judge Roy Moore, a Republican accused of sexual misconduct involving teenagers 40 years ago, thanks to a notable turnout of black voters.
In a state where the names of cities such as Selma and Birmingham invoke the struggle for the right to vote, some advocates argue Alabama’s photo-ID requirement is a form of voter suppression and the special election highlighted the problem with the law.
While Jones won by about 30,000 votes, the Legal Defense Fund estimates 118,000 Alabama citizens are unable to vote because they don’t have the proper ID to do so.
“There are other close elections going on in Alabama cities and local level where the difference is 50 or 100 votes,” Ross said in an interview. “And so that’s why we think every voter [having] an opportunity to have their vote cast and have that vote be counted is important. Every time the voter ID law stops one person or 100,000 from voting, we think it’s an issue.”
Ross is one of the attorneys representing Greater Birmingham Ministries and Alabama’s NAACP chapter as they challenge Alabama’s voter ID law in a federal case that is scheduled to be heard in a Tuscaloosa courtroom in February. The Legal Defense Fund is a separate entity from the NAACP.
Jones was carried to victory by black voters who turned up on the clear December day in numbers higher than expected. According to exit polling conducted by CNN, black voters overwhelmingly supported Jones, with 98 percent of black women voting for him.
Twenty-nine percent of voters in the Alabama special election were black, according to CNN, at a time when they make up about 26 percent of Alabama’s population. While one in four people in Alabama are black, one out of every three voters in line Tuesday deciding the race between Moore and Jones was African-American.
“It could have been larger if there were people who were not facing the burden of having to obtain ID,” Ross said, adding that the voter ID requirement disproportionately affects black voters.
On Tuesday night, Jones credited minority support for his win in his victory speech.