Alabama GOP chairman made the photo ID he used to vote

John Wahl ID Illustration

Alabama GOP Chairman John Wahl produced a peculiar ID when voting in recent elections. As it turns out, he made it himself with the state auditor's blessing. (Illustration by DJB Design)

This is a column.

When you vote in Alabama, state law requires you to show a photo ID at the polls.

For most folks, this means a driver’s license, but other forms of government-issued ID are permitted — a military ID, a passport or a college student ID, among others, will do.

And if you don’t have any of those, the Alabama Secretary of State’s office will help you get a special voter ID. The office will even make house calls for the non-ambulatory.

But the last few times Alabama Republican Party Chairman John Wahl voted, he presented poll workers with an ID they’d never seen before.

To someone who had never seen a state employee ID, it could be mistaken for one.

But it wasn’t. It bore a state seal, a barcode and Wahl’s picture. The badge said Wahl was a media representative for State Auditor Jim Zeigler.

But when I asked the Alabama Department of Finance, which administers employee IDs, that department said it had never issued him one, nor was Wahl on the list of employees, past and present, in Zeigler’s office.

As it turns out, Wahl made the ID, he says, with Zeigler’s permission.

And now, the state’s top election official, Secretary of State John Merrill, says that badge is not a valid voter ID.

“It does not meet the standard of any voter ID requirements listed under 17-9-30,” Merrill said, citing where Alabama’s voter ID law appears in the State Code.

In another conversation, I told Wahl that I had concerns that his ID did not pass muster under the law.

“That’s a legitimate question,” Wahl said.

Trouble at the polls

Wahl’s extended family has had trouble for years voting near their family farm in Limestone County in north Alabama. According to Wahl, his family has a background in Anabaptism, and like Mennonites and the Amish, some of them have religious concerns about being photographed.

In a 2015 deposition, Wahls’ brother Joshua Wahl said he and others in their family believe biometric identification — including photographs that could be used by facial recognition software — is the mark of the beast foretold in Revelation.

This has caused trouble for the Wahls at the polls.

Beginning in 2014, poll workers have refused to let the Wahl family vote with a conventional ballot.

The Wahls have attempted to use an exception to the law that allows voters to cast a ballot if two poll workers sign an affidavit positively identifying them.

Frequently, though, the poll workers at the Wahls’ precinct have been reluctant to do so, and sometimes they have refused.

Only two Wahl family members have been able to vote consistently, state voting record show — John and his father, who uses an old photo ID from when he worked at the Redstone Arsenal.

And in at least two recent elections, John Wahl has used his unusual ID to vote.

Alabama GOP Chairman John Wahl

When poll workers asked Alabama GOP Chairman John Wahl for his voter ID, he gave them a card they'd never seen before. He texted this picture of it to the Limestone County Probate judge, who then approved him to vote. Wahl now says he made the ID badge on a third-party printer with the blessing of State Auditor Jim Zeigler.

One question, two answers

Wahl, who is the top GOP party official in the state, and I have now had a number of conversations about his problems at the polls. In those, he has cast blame on poll workers and said I’ve scared his family by writing about their problems at the polls.

But in those conversations, Wahl has been somewhat evasive about how he got the ID he used to vote.

Last week, I asked Wahl again who made the ID.

“It was a state auditor’s ID,” he said.

OK, but who physically made the ID? Was it him?

“I did not make it myself,” he said then.

I asked him who had. He declined to say on the record and I told him I wasn’t interested in talking off the record anymore.

This week, I spoke with Wahl again. He called me after he learned I had asked the Secretary of State’s office about the ID’s validity. This time, his answer evolved.

According to Wahl, he had done volunteer work for Zeigler after Zeigler was elected state auditor. When he assisted Zeigler with setting up email systems, a third-party provider asked him for credentials showing he was authorized to do so. That’s when, he says, they made the ID.

“I took that to Jim Ziegler,” he said. “We talked about it and at that point, he authorized the creation of a press credential for my position as a press secretary.”

From this point forward, in the story, Wahl uses the word “we” a lot.

“We used a printer to print the ID,” he said.

You used the printer to print the ID, I repeated back.

“We used a third party — a third party printer to print the ID,” he said.

I then asked him who he meant by we — was it him and Zeigler?

“Yeah,” he said.

State Auditor changes story

Zeigler’s recollections about the ID have evolved, too.

As I first reported on this story, I called Zeigler’s cell several times to talk to him about it. I even went to his office in the state capitol once, but he wasn’t there and neither was anyone else. The door was locked.

After I left a message on the office voice mail, he finally called me back. He said then that his recollection of the ID was vague.

“My recollection is, before he was ever party chairman, I was doing one of my many investigations and he helped do it,” Zeigler said last month. “And I remember vaguely something about he needed some ID that he could legitimately do this for me. That’s all I remember.”

Zeigler later spoke to Wahl about the ID and after that, his recollection changed to mostly match Wahl’s. In an email to me this week, he said he had been confused earlier because we had a bad connection over the phone.

“I had asked John Wahl to help the State Auditor’s Office with news media work in a volunteer press secretary role,” Zeigler wrote. “The office does not have a staffer that does this. John agreed to assist us pro bono.

“Later, John Wahl informed me that vendors who disseminate e-mail news releases would require some type of press credential. He said that should be no problem to provide. That was the first and last I heard about the press credential, and the e-mail releases were distributed.”

I tried to reach Zeigler again on his cell to ask him follow-up questions.

Did he help make it? Whose printer did they use? Has he made similar IDs for others?

He did not return my call.

Legit Alabama employee ID

This redacted ID is what a real Alabama employee ID badge looks like for the State Auditor's Office. According to the Alabama Department of Finance, which administers and issues state employee IDs, it never gave one to John Wahl. (Screenshot courtesy of the Alabama Department of Finance.)Screenshot courtesy of the Alabama Department of Finance

What’s that barcode?

Throughout all this, there has been one more thing about that ID that left me scratching my head.

The ID has a barcode.

State employee IDs use microchips to interface with door locks in state office buildings. They do not have barcodes. In fact, the folks at the Finance Department pointed to this repeatedly as evidence it was not a state ID.

So what was the barcode for?

In our last conversation, I asked Wahl.

At first, he suggested it might be his birthdate.

I told him I had decoded the barcode and that it did not appear to be his birthdate. It was a sequence of numbers, mostly zeroes, unlike anything on state employee ID badges.

“I’m not sure what it is,” he said, adding that the ID did not give him special access to public buildings, privileged information or government records.

But he had made it, I said. Didn’t he know what the barcode was for? Was it just to make the ID look more authentic?

“I believe that the barcode is associated with that ID,” he said.

I then asked him whether he was aware of any other IDs being made for other people, or if this was the only one.

“Not that I know of,” he said.

Don’t blame the poll workers

Wahl has taken issue with and cast blame at the poll workers at his voting place, but there is now a bright irony here that needs to be made clear.

Public records show Wahl pushed successfully in 2022 to have Clyde Martin, a retired electrical engineer, removed as a poll worker after Martin complained to higher-ups.

But when Wahl showed Martin that ID in 2020, Martin let him use it to vote.

Wahl has said that in 2020 he left his wallet behind and that ID was all he had on him. Most folks in that situation would have turned around and made a round-trip home. Wahl didn’t have to because Martin gave him the benefit of the doubt.

In retrospect, maybe Martin shouldn’t have.

And when Wahl went back to the polls this year, he used that ID again — that time very much on purpose. The poll worker who replaced Martin, Sarah Chadwell, told me she wanted to take a picture of it and research it herself.

Instead, Limestone County Probate Judge Charles Woodroof approved Wahl voting after Wahl texted him a picture of the ID.

“I felt like I was being harassed, and that’s why I made an issue out of it with the probate judge and why I used it again,” Wahl said.

But we know now that Chadwell was right to be skeptical of the badge.

It’s a legitimate question, as Wahl now says.

But it didn’t have to be. Wahl has told me he has a driver’s license. All he had to do was show it.

Just like you. Just like me. Just like his party has fought hard to require of voters in Alabama.

And none of this would have happened.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group, 2020 winner of the Walker Stone Award, winner of the 2021 SPJ award for opinion writing, and 2021 winner of the Molly Ivins prize for political commentary.

You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb. And on Twitter. And on Instagram.

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