Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill visited Selma on Thursday to speak to the public about voter fraud and improvements made in the business services part of the office.

Merrill said that his office has been focusing on election and voter registration, business services and international adoptions.

“We chose those three areas because those three areas affect families on a daily basis,” he said. “We want to be respectable to Alabama families.”

On the voter registration side, Merrill took to each county to help register people to vote.

“We made a commitment that every single eligible U.S. citizen in Alabama is registered to vote and has a voter ID,” said Merrill. “We go to all 67 counties every year with our mobile unit to make sure that we are at an event and we actually have gone to people’s homes and given them a photo ID when they tell us they can’t make it to our events. That takes the argument away from liberals who tell us we aren’t doing enough to give everyone an opportunity to vote. “We just want to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to vote and all we are trying to do is make it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” he said. “Since I have been secretary, we registered 1,064,616 people in Alabama to vote. We now have 3,418,839 registered voters in Alabama. Those numbers are unprecedented and unparalleled in the history of the state. We also removed more than 150,000 people from the vote roll because those people have either moved away, passed away or been put away. We had four conviction in voter fraud and three elections overturned.

“I still believe we have a lot more work to do in that area it is important for you all to know that we have a situation in Jefferson County we have been working on for more than two years,” he said. “I cannot stand for people to take advantage of the electoral process. When you have 119 absentee ballots mailed to one location … and all of these people have different names on the applications, that is a problem. We were able to get this election overturned, but we are still not finished with it.”

Merrill then spoke about the change in priorities at the business services part of his office.

“We started in our office with 49 employees, and today we have 39 employees,” he said. “It was clear to us very quickly that we have some outstanding employees in the office, and it was also clear to us that we had employees that needed to find a job outside of state government. Those people are not committed to our people they do not believe in giving a full day’s work for a full day’s pay and I am not supportive of that we were not going to tolerate it.

“So we made sure when people came into this office that they were going to work hard,” he said. “What has happened is that slowly but surely we have had people that have decided they wanted to go somewhere else to work. Part of that is because those people had not been held accountable.

“When I first started running I was told to not worry about business licenses,” Merrill said. Business service was seven to nine months behind on filing. When it got to Montgomery it was seven to nine months before the paperwork was confirmed and the check was cashed.

“We made significant changes,” Merrill said. “In spite of the fact that we are down 25 percent of our workforce, the office, for 117 consecutive weeks, has been same day filing for those who have paid that same day fee. We are operating at the speed of business instead of the speed of government.”