> Your own article says that Secretary of State will be providing IDs to ensure the DMV closures don’t affect ability to vote.

That was just Secretary of State John Merrill's claim, and I'm saying that it was a careless one. "There are still places to get voter ID, just 31 fewer places out of about 100" is not the same as "anyone who wants an ID can still get one". The burden of proof was on the Merrill to demonstrate that the Board of Registrar's offices and the mobile ID van (which in 2014 officially appeared 2 out of 25 times on weekends and 23 out of 25 times on weekdays usually during 9-5 hours [1][2]) would compensate for the lack of possibly closer-by DMVs.

Consider the context of the voter ID laws themselves [3]:

> Under the new law, which only went into effect in 2014, only a handful of forms of ID, including driver’s licenses, meet the requirements.

> Civil rights groups vehemently opposed the legislation, noting that these IDs are harder to obtain for minorities, who among other things are more reliant on public transportation. A state analysis showed that 500,000 registered voters lacked a driver’s licenses around the time the law was being put into effect.

What ended up happening after the 31 DMVs were closed was [4]:

> However, since the photo ID voting law went into effect in 2014, only a small portion of the estimated 250,000 Alabamans who do not already have the accepted IDs have obtained the free version. In 2014, an election year, only 5,294 of those IDs were issued, state officials told TPM.

> The number of IDs issued this year is even smaller. As of September 28, 1,442 IDs had been issued since January 2, 2015.

...

> However, as of last Monday, only 29 IDs were issued from the mobile units this year and four from the state capitol, according to the secretary of state’s office.

...

> Civil rights activists point to several reasons for why, they say, the free ID program has been ineffective. For one, many of the black residents affected by the DMV closures live miles from the county offices that issue IDs and African-Americans are more likely to be dependent on public transport.

And then consider what Merrill said about the DMV closures [3]:

> The way Merrill sees it, the closures will cause “a real inconvenience” for those seeking driver’s license, but have no bearing on Alabamans’ ability to vote, since the 67 boards of registrars remain open.

...

> The [state] ID is one of them,” Merrill said. “I don’t know why people don’t have driver’s licenses, except that they don’t drive. Maybe some of them can’t drive, but I don’t know.”

In the best light, Merrill didn't understand the burden of needing to rely on public transportation to travel possibly farther than you would have needed to if the DMV that used to be available stopped being available.

Tangentially, I feel as if Merrill, along with other Alabama officials, was being gaslit [5]:

> Collier reported that Mason proposed closing multiple driver's license offices throughout the State and asked ALEA to put together a plan. It was Collier's understanding that Mason intended the plan to be rolled out in a way that had limited impact on Governor Bentley's political allies. Collier claims he reported this to the Attorney General' s office because he was concerned about a Voting Rights Act violation.

...

> Ultimately, the decision to close the offices was reversed, in part, after the state litigated the issue with the U.S. Department of Transportation, which had claimed that the closures had a disproportionate impact on minority communities.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141102180855/http://www.alabam...

[2] https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/?year=2014

[3] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/alabama-voter-id-dmv

[4] https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/alabama-free-voter-id...

[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20170408201133/http://bentleyinv...