Kimberly Butler.

Another contest has been filed in Lauderdale County for the District 2 Republican primary race.

One of the candidates, Kimberly Butler, submitted a contest affidavit to the Alabama GOP. Butler says ALGOP acknowledged they received it but did not say if they would hear the challenge or not. The News Courier has reached out to the ALGOP to find out.

Butler alleges that the runoff on June 21 was invalid because Jason Black “was not the proper candidate.” The challenge contests the nomination of Ben Harrison on grounds of “malconduct, fraud, or corruption” due to incorrect registration or assigning of voters that she claims would have voted for her in the primary. The affidavit states this would render Black the incorrect candidate for the runoff, and the result of Harrison’s nomination inaccurate since he did not face the right candidate.

“I understand and share the concerns about the mistakes made in the redistricting process, but that doesn’t make it okay to discount thousands of votes from legitimate voters,” Harrison said. “We need to address the mistakes so we can make sure they never happen again, and we also need to look at the facts overall.”

“She’s got a case. But she isn’t going to win it,” Black said. “They’re not going to have another election.”

Black said the ALGOP has already shot down two other election challenges in the state for similar allegations of incorrect ballots. He said he believes this was something that just got mixed up among Lauderdale’s Board of Registrars. According to Probate Judge Will Motlow, who oversees elections in the county, that’s exactly what happened.

“Those voters had been assigned to District 1, but in the redraw they moved into District 2. They were right on the line and I think (the Board of Registrars) just missed it. It’s human error, unfortunately, but it happened.”

The claim of voter fraud is not uncommon these days. The Brennan Center for Justice explains that despite repeated false claims of voter fraud in elections nationally, “fraud is very rare, voter impersonation is virtually nonexistent, and many instances of alleged fraud are, in fact, mistakes by voters or administrators.”

“Redistricting caused a good bit of confusion,” Motlow said. “We were really chopped up with a lot of district lines. I was told that we actually led the state in number of ballot styles because of the way the districts were drawn.”

“We really do stress that there was no intentional error. I think there are ways to keep this from happening,” Motlow said.

He explained that there is more sophisticated mapping software that other nearby counties have updated their services to but Lauderdale has not yet. He said this means the Board of Registrars is “operating with inferior tools” and it would be appropriate to make an investment to make sure this mistake does not happen again.

“It’s happened before. It’s happened in this county before in years past. It’s happened in other counties. This is not a new problem,” Motlow said.

“It’s a terrible mistake. and it’s a travesty of justice to Kimberly Butler if she was supposed to be in the runoff.” Black said. “You would think that, instead of voting for Ben, they would’ve voted for her (if she was in the runoff) because those that voted against him, voted against him they didn’t just vote for me. So, she may have actually been the winner.”

Black said that the fact of the matter is that there is no telling if she was supposed to be in the runoff or not. Because those people who were incorrectly registered in District 1 rather than District 2 could have just as easily voted for him or Harrison, they would not have necessarily all voted for her. She claims in the affidavit at least 42 would have, which would have given her the votes to put her in second place for the runoff.

Harrison says the votes were clearly in his favor regardless.

“Approximately 70 people received incorrect ballots for State House, while I won the Republican Primary by 175 votes, and the runoff by 861 votes,” he said. “The bottom line is that there were nowhere near enough votes affected to make up that difference.”