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The Alabama Republican Party meets tomorrow to decide if Senator Tommy Tuberville has lived in the state long enough to run for governor. He overwhelmingly won the Republican primary last month with 85% of the vote, but now Tuberville has to prove his residency. This comes amidst allegations that he may have voted illegally in Florida. From WBHM in Birmingham, Richard Banks reports.
RICHARD BANKS, BYLINE: Tommy Tuberville has long had a beach home on the Florida Gulf Coast, where he's spent a lot of time. In fact, when he was running for the U.S. Senate in 2020, his primary opponent, Jeff Sessions, called him Florida Man after he wouldn't debate.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Maybe Tommy Tuberville would be willing to debate if we did it at his home in Florida.
BANKS: Now that Tuberville is running for governor of Alabama, his unsuccessful GOP primary opponent, Ken McFeeters, is making the same argument. McFeeters finished a distant second but challenged Tuberville's residency throughout his campaign. Now McFeeters says Tuberville is relying on the Republican Party to clear him.
KEN MCFEETERS: The vast majority of people in Alabama don't believe he actually lives in Alabama and that it's a go-around to get around Alabama's Constitution, which states he has to live here for seven years continuously.
BANKS: County records show Tuberville's wife and son have owned a 1,500-square-foot house in Auburn since 2018. Tuberville's name did not appear on the deed until last year. McFeeters insists Tuberville show more proof.
MCFEETERS: Be transparent. Give your records to the people of Alabama, and it all goes away. You'll be our next governor.
BANKS: Attorneys for Tuberville released heavily redacted tax records they say prove he's lived in Alabama since 2018. Problem is records also show that Tuberville voted in Florida in November of that same year. Tuberville is a co-sponsor of President Donald Trump's SAVE America Act. Here's Tuberville on the Senate floor earlier this year.
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TOMMY TUBERVILLE: The SAVE America Act is most important. It requires voters to show a government ID to vote in federal elections. What a thought. This is common sense.
BANKS: For his part, Tuberville told the Alabama Daily News he had no clue about how he voted in Florida in 2018 while also filing income tax returns in Alabama that same year. Tuberville's spokesperson said he did not switch over his driver's license to Alabama until 2019. Noemi Oeding is a political science professor at Samford University in Alabama. She says critics now want to see his driver's license records.
NOEMI OEDING: You know, the SAVE Act - one of the key parts of that is the requirement of a photo identification card. And so I think the biggest question here is, will Senator Tuberville provide his proof of Alabama driver's license?
BANKS: The Tuberville campaign did not answer that question, and they did not grant an interview. But Morgan Murphy, Tuberville's former national security adviser, says there are good reasons not to release driver's license records.
MORGAN MURPHY: There are a lot of security concerns around being such a public figure as Coach. I worked for him in his office in D.C., and we regularly got - he regularly got death threats.
BANKS: Murphy says he believes Tuberville has released all he needs to. Besides, he says, Republican voters have already made up their minds.
MURPHY: Well, he has satisfied voters. The voters chose overwhelmingly to elect him as the Republican nominee for governor - by a landslide.
BANKS: Even if the Alabama Republican Party rules in Tuberville's favor, a court challenge to his residency qualifications is likely.
For NPR News, I'm Richard Banks in Birmingham, Alabama.
(SOUNDBITE OF ZAZZO'S "EXPRESS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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