The Auditor Tracking Alabama’s Millions in Government Property

Blair Castro and Thomas Jenkins sit down on “The People’s Voice” with Alabama State Auditor Andrew Sorrell as he seeks re-election and continues his push for government transparency, accountability, and protecting taxpayer dollars.

In this episode, Sorrell explains one of the least understood — but most important — statewide offices in Alabama and why keeping track of more than a billion dollars in state-owned property matters to everyday taxpayers. From uncovering waste to improving oversight across state agencies, Sorrell says his mission is simple: government should be accountable to the people funding it.

The conversation also dives into his background as a businessman, former legislator, and statewide elected official, along with his efforts to modernize the Auditor’s Office, cut unnecessary spending, and make state government more transparent for Alabama families.

WATCH as Andrew Sorrell breaks down what the State Auditor actually does, why the role matters more than many people realize, and what’s ahead if voters send him back to office.

To learn more, go to: www.AndrewSorrell.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Good afternoon. Welcome to WFUZ TV, the People's Voice Podcast. I'm Blair Castro here with Thomas Jenkins. And we have Mr. Andrew Sorrell in the studio with us. He's running for Alabama State Auditor. Mr. Sorrell, thank you so much for coming all the way to Gulf Shores to be on our show and tell us a little bit about your campaign.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

It's great to be down here with you. I love this area of the state. I live in Muscle Shoals, so I am six hours north of you. And uh thankfully I have uh I have lots of reasons to be in Baldwin County. There's there's a lot of big events down here. There's a huge Republican primary vote down here and across the bay over in Mobile. So I found myself down here probably eight or ten times throughout the course of the campaign. Uh but you know, that being said, I always tell people down here, I know what it feels like to be three hours from Montgomery. You know, I'm just three hours in the opposite direction as you. And I've also told my wife many, many times, if we ever move anywhere else in Alabama, I want to be in Baldwin County. I love this place. I owned owned rental property down here for a number of years. And any excuse I can get to come to the beach, I I generally take it. I'm one of those guys, I love the warm weather. So if it's 96 and sunny, I am happy. My wife doesn't so much love the heat and humidity, but uh I could definitely see myself living down here. But uh hoping to live the next four years again in Montgomery, which is what I call my second home. But when people ask me where are you from, I never say Montgomery. I am from Mussel Scholes. Yes, I do live the majority of my life in Montgomery as your current state auditor. Have enjoyed doing that the last four years, hoping to do it again for another four years. But I I consider myself a Muscle Scholzian, if that's the way you say that. And uh I go home every weekend. I think in three and a half years, I might have stayed over three weekends in Montgomery. But um, you know, everything, everything that I really care deeply about is back at home. Uh both sets of my kids' grandparents are back at home, my church is back home, my businesses are back home. So uh we make it a practice to go back home on the weekends.

SPEAKER_03 1:52

That's awesome. So you got your start. Uh I guess let's go back to the beginning. What made you get involved in politics? I know you were a state rep. Um so starting with that, like what was kind of your trajectory and what made you decide to initially run for auditor?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Yeah, it started a long time before that. Uh, my story goes all the way back to 2009 when Barack Obama got sworn in as president of the United States. And I had started a college textbook company, and uh I was working in my parents' screen porch and we had a radio in there, and just out of kind of boredom, I turned on the radio and started listening to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Dave Ramsey, all the all the big talk radio personalities. And uh I say that helped shape my political philosophy because before I always voted Republican. You know, my parents drilled it into me. My parents are not political people, uh, but my parents always made sure, hey, you're gonna go vote. I mean, you turned 18, go register to vote. And I've never missed an election. That includes municipals and everything. I've I've always understood the importance of voting, but they never drove me into politics. In fact, they kind of scratched their heads and wonder how their son ended up in politics. Um I'll I'll get more to that in a second in my parents' background and everything. But through listening to Rush Limbaugh, I really realized there's so many reasons to be a Republican. And, you know, I was raised in a Christian home with dad being a preacher. I voted Republican because we were Christians. But, you know, there's a million other reasons to vote Republican as well. And I'd say that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck educated me. And and then I just got motivated, man. They started the Tea Party Wave started in 2009. I distinctly remember taking my tea bag and mailing it to my congressman in 2009. So that's that's that's where I got started. In fact, I'll be speaking at a group tonight that that sprung out of the Tea Party movement, the Common Sense Campaign. They were an old Tea Party group. And uh then I realized, man, the area I live is completely controlled by the Democrats. Uh, I moved over to Florence. I attended UNA, and in Florence, there were something like 28 elected officials in Lauderdale County, and 27 of them were Democrats. So I got involved in the local party. I went and a friend of mine said, You should run for the Lauderdale County Republican Executive Committee. And I said, What's that? And here I am 23 years old. He said, Well, you pay $25 and you get your name on your on the ballot, which I thought, hey, that sounds kind of cool. And I ended up being unopposed, so my name didn't go on the ballot. But uh, anytime you take a sure win in politics, you just take it, right? You know, don't wish for don't wish for an opponent. But I signed up for this committee, not even fully understanding what it was, got involved in the county committee in 2010 and began working local races. And then in 2014, I ran for the state executive committee and in a four-way race, I managed to to win that. Um, running against some some bigger name people. People did not expect to here I was, what, 27 or so at the time. They did not expect me to be able to pull that off and win. Uh, but I did and got a seat on the state committee, have been on that ever since 2014, now serve as the bylaws chairman for the Alabama Republican Party, been doing that for five and a half years. We've passed 40 bylaws. I'm 40 for 40. One of them took me two tries, but all 40 bylaws that my committee has brought forth to the full body have passed. So I've been in the party a long time, worked a lot of races as a kind of a volunteer campaign manager and consultant, and flipped a lot of seats in North Alabama from Democrat to Republican, then began eyeing House District 3. And in 2014, my predecessor at at state rep, Marcel Black, was re-elected with less than 60% of the vote for the first time. And I remember thinking that's a winnable seat for a Republican in 2018. I've got to find a Republican who will run. And you know what? Nobody wanted to run against a 28-year incumbent who had all the money in the world and in a seat that had been blue for 150 years. And finally, kind of out of frustration, I said, I'll run then. If no one else will do it, I'll step up and run. So I did. And that's that's my story of how I got into politics. And while in the legislature, I ended up obviously you know you figured out the story. I did win the race. I got 52% of the vote. I was the narrowest win in the state house in 2018, just barely slid in there. And while in the legislature, my predecessor, who lives right here in Baldwin County, Jim Ziegler, he asked me if I would carry uh some legislation dealing with the state auditor's office, and that got me interested in it. And I qualified. There was five of us initially in the race for state auditor in 2022. I was at last place in the polling at 3%. Uh, but I slowly worked my way up, um, set a fundraising record for state auditor at the time in 2022, ended up making it into a runoff and winning the runoff in June of 2022, and there was no Democrat running. So it was it was, for all intents and purposes, over, just waiting for the general election in 2022. So that's kind of my story, how how I got to be sitting between y'all today. So, what does a state auditor do exactly? Great question. It depends on what state you're in. And it's the same thing you'll find for the treasurer's offices. Um, the treasurer has widely varied duties around, and it's all crafted by whatever individual states, whatever legislation assigns them duties, that's what they end up doing. The duties of the auditor in Alabama are very different from the duties of the auditor in Nebraska, like my friend Mike Foley, who used to be auditor up there, we've talked about this. But what the Alabama auditor does, which I think is what's relevant to your viewers here today, are really three big things. We have three duties. Number one, we track all the state's property. I don't mean real estate, I mean personal property. So a pickup truck, iPad, shotgun, um, out dot equipment, anything of value that's non-consumable that costs $500 or more goes on the property rolls. There are 300,000 inventory items. There's 180 different state boards and agencies that we audit. I mean, literally from the governor's office on down, we audit. There are some agencies that have only one or two pieces of property. There are agencies that have $69 million worth of property, like Department of Corrections. By the way, they got a perfect audit. They were not missing a single piece of inventory out of $69 million. And I like to brag on former Commissioner Ham because that's really, really impressive that he was able to do that. Then I also joke that the problem with our prisons is not stuff going out of the prisons, it's what's going into the prisons. It's a much bigger problem. Uh, but we audit the state's property, $1.3 billion worth of taxpayer property that we keep track of and make sure it's not getting lost. And we have a really good track record of doing that. Um, I also appoint a lot of 69 appointments, um, all election-related appointments in Alabama, 69 different people I have points to various boards and whatnot, most of those being Board of Registrars members who register you to vote, keep the voter rolls clean. That's their job. And I serve on the Board of Adjustment. So you can't sue the state of Alabama. So if you have a claim against the state, you have to put it in with the board of adjustment. And your auditor, your treasurer, your secretary of state, and your finance director, the four of us serve on that board. And whoever is currently serving as chairman, their vote counts double in the case of a tie. Is that an immunity that's unique to the state of Alabama? No. Um, pretty much all states have in their constitutions that you can't sue their state. Uh the federal government, same thing, you can't sue the federal government. So, yeah, the they give themselves that protection. However, the legislature did realize the inherent unfairness of that system. Yeah. And they created this board of adjustment to adjust claims against the departments of the state. And we have a wide variety of claims that come in. We had a claim for uh five million dollars last year, and it was a wrongful death claim. They someone said that the state troopers failed to properly administer first aid on the side of the highway and and someone died. We heard all the details in that case. We ended up voting to deny that claim because it turns out the ambulance had been there. The first responders, they had tried to revive the individual several times, were unsuccessful. They were passed away long before the troopers ever got there. So we didn't think that was the trooper's fault. So we we voted no on that claim. And we have on the other end of the spectrum, we had a claim for $17 of tuna fish from a prisoner. You know, prisoners actually have property rights and they can buy things in the prison commissary, and you send you send Uncle Bobby some money and he can go buy himself some tuna fish in the prison, you know. And they have a right to that stuff. And if they're moved or transferred, that property, you fill out a property sheet, that property is supposed to move with you. And it the tuna fish got lost in the shuffle. And I so I voted to pay that one because I said, nobody lies about $17 a tuna fish. He has to be telling the truth. If you were going to lie, you put $170 at least, right? So we pay them. He got his tuna fish. So everything in between. I mean, there's quarters we get $30 million worth of claims that come in, and we have to sit there and we had it, we had a big one this quarter with a $750,000 claim that we're still debating amongst the four of us, you know, what to do on that claim. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

What motivates you to do something like that? It that seems like a very monotonous chore to go through line items, especially at that level. Trevor Burrus, Jr. It's funny.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

People are like, wait a minute, you're the state auditor and you're the bylaws chairman for the L Band with all the party. Like, could you possibly pick two more boring jobs than two picking? But you know, they're really not boring. Once you get into it and start doing it, I enjoy it. Uh I my predecessor as bylaws chairman was a man named Elbert Peters. He was bylaws chair for something like 40 years. And I was his protege. You know, he he taught me everything I know about the bylaws. And I remember but before he passed away a couple of years ago, I'd been elected bylaws chairman. I called and said, Do you want to do this again? He said, No. I said, Why don't you do it? And I'll just be on the committee. And I said, Okay. So it was pretty intimidating because every single bylaw change we were debating, he would say, Well, I wrote that one back in 1987. And so it was, it was tough, you know. But he was he was good to me. But he was always respectful. He would never call me out in front of the group, but we would get off the phone, uh, get off our conference calls, and he would call me right after, and he would say, Mr. Chairman, here's the three things you did wrong during this meeting. And he would go through it. But no, I enjoy bylaw as chairman. I enjoy being the state auditor. And uh yeah, I'd love to do it again for another four years.

SPEAKER_03 11:43

So I just have a practical question because I'm actually really interested in this. I didn't even like really think about this as a role that people do. When you're doing an audit of all this state inventory and physical things, do you have people that go out on site, like people from your office, to put eyes on a lot of this?

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Absolutely. Yeah, we don't we don't check it in unless we put eyes on it. Or in some cases, if someone will text us to photograph. So, for instance, there's an elected official who has a vehicle and he lives about three hours from Montgomery. Uh, we do not make him drive the car to Montgomery to prove that he hasn't. Uh we we will accept a picture of the VIN number, a picture of the vehicle, and his sworn statement that he has it in his possession. You know, things like uh a cell phone for the lieutenant governor. I'm not going to go physically say, pull it out of your pocket, sir, I need to see it. So but but other than that, yes, we are physically looking at uh every piece of state property and making sure that it's there. And I'll tell you this, um, we've we've made the process a lot more efficient because we have now RFID chipped all 300,000 items. Oh wow. So if we were to, if we had 37 items in this house that were um that were state government property, we could come under the scanner and just in a matter of minutes we could we'd have all of them. And then we just go look for the one that's missing rather than you know, the old thing of crawling under the desk and looking for the label and scanning it, those days thankfully are pretty much over. Uh and the way we do it now, I mean, used to we'd take you know five weeks to do some of the larger audits, we're doing them in two and a half now. So we're more efficient, we've got fewer auditors than ever before. Uh we're I think we're running more efficiently than ever before, and we're and more importantly, we're losing less property.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

So in the in the history of not necessarily being an office but being around that circle, have you heard of anything major coming up missing that was of interest? Oh, there's definitely big stuff missing.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

Uh we we helped uncover there was a uh there was an agency that had some uh vehicles, some you know, historic type vehicles like Corvettes and stuff from the 70s. And they they were missing when we did their audit, and we said, Where did these go? And they said, Oh, well, one of the directors at the agency actually purchased it. And we're like, You can't do that. Right. Um, and of course, as you as you might guess, it was purchased for 15,000 and the value was fifty thousand. And so that was a problem. And we we informed the examiners of public accounts. Um, by the way, the examiners, they went in and investigated them, they found all kinds of problems. The entire board was fired by the governor just a few months ago. You can go read about this. The entire board got fired by the governor, and now there's been criminal charges filed against some of those individuals. So, yes, stuff comes up missing. Like you can't just take state property and just willy-nilly sell it off to whoever you want. There's a process, and it goes to us. You got to send it to state surplus, uh, which is run through a DECA. Uh, they've got a location in Eva, Alabama, up uh up in Morgan County, or they've got a location here in Montgomery. And that stuff all goes on govdeals.com and gets auctioned off so that the state actually recoupes the money that we're supposed to recoup. We don't want sweetheart deals for friends. We don't want people getting pickup trucks for $5,000, and that's all coming out of taxpayers' pockets. And it's wrong. And and but so you we have uncovered some things. I've also had cases where we've caught people destroying state property. So I had a Department of Public Health employee whose job it was to take uh inventory to surplus and unload it there for them to then auction off. He gets there, there's a line, there's nobody to help him unload. He just backs up the box truck, starts throwing stuff off the back of the box truck onto the concrete floor, destroys over $20,000 worth of your equipment. And he did it on video. So my staff's like, well, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? And I said, I'm gonna wait and see what his supervisor does first. This will be interesting. So his supervisor, they have to fill out like a property form, a disposal form, and tell us what happened. And there's a corrective action taken section of that form. And his supervisor wrote, Told him to be more patient next time.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Wow, that's really holding people accountable there. Great job. So we contacted him. I reached out and I said, This is not acceptable. He said, Well, uh, what do you think I should do? I don't know. Firing him. How about that? That's what I would do as a business owner. I would fire him. Well, you know, it's hard to fire government employees. So I said, Well, put the guy on a repayment plan, have him pay us back, start withholding it out of his check. So they did. They put him on a repayment plan. Guess what happened after his first paycheck? He quit. He quit. So I didn't get all your money back, but at least he doesn't work for the state. He's not going to destroy any more property. But we're holding people accountable now for the negligent loss of state property.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Circling back, how how and for what purpose does the state acquire a classic car? Uh for museums. I gotcha. Yeah. It's just for museums. That would be that would be the only reason. Yeah. Gotcha. So not like for governor personal transport. Oh no.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

Although the governor does have three houses. Uh there's the Winton Blood Mansion, there's the Governor's Mansion, and down here in Fort Morgan, there's the Governor's Beach House. And we do audit all three of those. It was a very convenient excuse for me to get to take a tour of all three of them. Thankfully, the the guy at the Capitol, he's over Capitol Operations. And he also handles all the repairs and maintenance and stuff. He also is over all three of the governor's properties, the security, the you know, everything. So he was nice enough. I said, hey, I'd really love to see the governor's beach house. You know, we're auditing them next week. Can I come down and see it?

SPEAKER_00 17:00

He took me on a tour. So that's going to take me overnight.

SPEAKER_03 17:06

So those, I guess, will pass along to the next governor. That's pretty cool. I didn't even know that or think about that.

SPEAKER_01 17:11

Yeah, they sure will. They sure will. The Winton Blunt Mansion was donated by Winton Blunt, who I think he ran for governor back in the 70s, very wealthy man. And it's the same way it was. It doesn't, it hasn't been updated, remodeled, etc. It looks exactly the same as it did in the 1970s. So it's kind of frozen in time, which is kind of neat.

SPEAKER_03 17:30

So I wanted to ask a little bit about your background before politics. Uh what kind of like what did you study? What kind of like was your background before you really jumped into this when you talked about the Barack Obama thing, like prior to that?

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Yeah, entrepreneurship. Uh I'm I'm a businessman. I started off working at Chick-fil-A in 10th grade, $5.15 an hour and saved up $2,000. Started my first business with my brother. That's our college textbook company. Company did very well. We had 30 employees in my mid-20s. We were doing $9 million in revenue. Things were just really, really going well. And we hit the internet sales at the right time. You know, 2004 was a great time to start selling anything on the internet, but college textbooks especially. And uh so yeah, we timed it right. We we kind of had a vision for hey, brick and mortar bookstores are not gonna be a thing in 20 years. We need to get on the internet. So we did. Now the industry's changed even more. Now now it's all ebooks. So Pearson doesn't even hardly publish a book anymore. It's all e-books now. So, you know, once again, we're gonna have to innovate. Uh, but that was our first company, and then took the profits from that company and we opened up our second company, which is Gold Guns of Guitars. And we have two gun stores. We have one in Florence and we have one in Huntsville. And Lord willing, we'll have another one in June. We're buying one in Decatur. We're under contract, still working out some of the finer details and negotiating, but I think we're gonna be able to close on that in June. And I've got some rental properties scattered around. So anyway, I'm not in politics for the paycheck. I mean, I really I do this because I enjoy it and not because I need it. I'd probably make more money if I wasn't in politics. But uh, you know, uh somebody, somebody asked me the day, why didn't you grow your businesses bigger before you got started in politics? And I said, Well, you know, if I'd stayed in business and been successful and made more money, you know what I would have wanted to do later in life? Run for public office. I'm already doing what I would have wanted to do anyway. So why would I I'm happy I didn't order them in. I'm happy to be where I am and hope the voters give me another opportunity to serve for another four years.

SPEAKER_03 19:26

So you had a really cute ad. I loved your ad with your wife and your family. We were like auditing your household. Can you tell us about how that idea came and a little bit about your family helping make that ad for you?

SPEAKER_01 19:35

That idea was actually born out of desperation four years ago. So uh so I was doing very well fundraising four years ago, but my polling was very, very stubborn to move up. So as I raised a lot of money, one candidate ended up dropping out of the race. So we were down to four. Then on qualifying day, which is the last day you can sign up to run, one of the gentlemen who actually lives in the same county as me, so I'm very glad he exited the race because we would have split the North Alabama vote. He decided instead of qualifying for auditor, he was going to run for public service commission. So thankfully he did that and he exited the race, which was a big surprise to me. So now all of a sudden there's only three of us in the race. And but the other three, um, both of them had run statewide before, one of them multiple times. So I was starting off at a huge name ID disadvantage. And uh so I go up on air with my traditional kind of faith, family, freedom type ads, kind of what I call a typical cookie cutter political ad, moves the numbers, but it's not particularly memorable. Maybe it builds you some name ID. And I start creeping up in the polling, and the polling at the time was 45, 35, 20, and I was 20. And I creep up to about 30. Well, the guy at 35 starts falling down and I pass him, and I'm up at 33 or so, and he's at 28. This is about a month out from the election. Then I put up a new ad, and the public obviously did not like the ad I put up. And I start slipping in the polling. And pretty soon I find myself back in third, and now I'm down, he's at 35, and I'm at 28, and I'm like, I'm not even gonna make the runoff here. So we were at this point two weeks out from the election. I'm panicked, I've spent the most money in the race by far. I'm still in third place, and I can't figure out what's wrong. And I talked to my brother on the phone, he said, I don't think people like your ad. You need a better ad. He said, You are on TV, you're dominating your opponents on airtime, but people don't like your ad. So I went outside and I was picking up pine cones in my backyard and just praying and praying for an idea or a miracle so I could make the runoff because I had given up a seat that I worked, I knocked 11,000 doors to be elected to state house. I poured my heart and soul into flipping House District 3 in 2018, and I was risking that and giving it up to run for state auditor. And the Lord gave me an idea for a commercial, and it was hey, nobody knows what the state auditor's office does. Why don't I explain those duties to my baby? I had a six month old baby at the time. So we filmed it. And all the political consultants said, Do not do this. Terrible idea. But you know. Stick with your ad, you know, just run more, run more of the bad ad, kind of kind of suggestions. And I said, No, I'm gonna try this because something needs to change. So we filmed it. It was me pushing Liberty in the swing, and then I'm out there grilling, and she's sitting in a high chair with her with her, you know, chef hat on and her fork and spoon in her mouth and or or in her hands. And uh, we filmed that ad, popped it up. We only had it up by the time we got it filmed and produced and on TV, it was only five days until the election. But that ad shot me into first place. Wow. So I ended up getting 39%. The second place guy got 33%, made the runoff, and I said, Well, we got to do another ad like this for the runoff. So we did part two, and we we put that up and I ended up winning the race. So I like to do different ads than what other politicians do because I think they stick out and they're more memorable. And again, I wanna I want to jokingly, in a sense, inform people about what the auditor's office does because people don't really know. So I talked about the ad, if you haven't seen the ad, the ad is my wife saying, please re-elect my husband. If you don't, he's gonna come home and start auditing at home. And I'm in there like counting my daughter's like stuffed animals, and I'm counting the diapers and the baby drawer and stuff like that. That's that's kind of the humor of the ad. And that ad uh again has just done tremendous for me. We gotten really good feedback on that ad all over the state.

SPEAKER_03 23:18

I thought it was really memorable. I'll drop it in the comments too, so you guys can watch it.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

Yeah, please watch it.

SPEAKER_03 23:23

So uh kind of a follow-up question to that, you know, recently this week was kind of a negative ad about you. Yes. Do you have anything you'd like to say to address that to kind of clear things up or let people have an opportunity to hear what you know your response is about that?

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Sure. Well, I mean, first of all, it's not true. And second, uh, he wouldn't be going negative if he was leading in the polls. And that's that's just the truth. When people are ahead in the polls, they don't go negative. Why would you? So, I mean, our polling was looking strong. Uh, he was running uh a lot of positive ads, really uh you know, two or three times as many TV ads as we were running. His polling was was not really responding. And so I guess he decided to to go negative on me and throw throw some mashed potatoes up against the wall and see what sticks. And the the story there is that I had a friend who I trusted. I invested some money with the guy. Turns out he was dishonest. He stole the money. He was running basically a Ponzi scheme with it. And I lost my money. Thankfully, not a life-changing amount of money. Um, I learned a good lesson, but you know, you don't you don't get where I am in business and politics without taking risk. And I've taken risk of my life. Some have worked out, some haven't worked out. And also, he was one of the donors to my campaign. So, you know, the headlines read, like state auditor's largest donor, you know, is running Ponzi scheme. Terrible, terrible art. Of course, I didn't know. I had nothing to do with it. It was, it was very, very unfortunate what happened. And I refunded every penny that I ever got from the guy uh for this campaign. I wrote him a check and I sent it back to, not to him, I sent it to the court-appointed receiver so the other victims of the scheme could get their money back. Well, my opponent decided to take that and twist it into that I was like somehow participating in running this Ponzi scheme, which is one of the most dishonest, disingenuous political attacks that I have ever seen. So we have put a we put a response out, and uh maybe you can drop a link to that one in the comments too. But we're uh we we put a response video out to that, the the allegations are untrue, and I think he's just getting desperate.

SPEAKER_03 25:21

Yeah, and from what I understand, the Ponzi scheme guy, there he gave money to multiple candidates, and I think a lot of them returned the money as soon as this all came to light. I don't think that's unique to you.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Definitely not. He gave money to 300 candidates.

SPEAKER_03 25:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

So yeah, this is definitely not unique to me. I was I was a you know, m small chunk of the the millions or so of dollars that he donated to political candidates. Uh there were there were six other candidates in Alabama who had to return money, but none of the other candidates are candidates for statewide office, and that makes a whole lot more headlines.

SPEAKER_03 25:53

Yeah. So aside from the fact that you have done this job before and you have the experience, what are some other qualifications that you think uh, you know, people should vote for you over your opponent? What makes you unique for this role?

SPEAKER_01 26:04

Yeah, I think I I think uh look at my service in the legislature. So anytime you have somebody running for office, you know, for the first time, you never you can listen to what they say they're gonna do. We all know how politicians will say one thing and do another when they get elected. You don't really know if someone's telling the truth until you've elected them and you see what they do. Now, some people, like Donald Trump, told us what he was gonna do in 2016 and then did it. What a surprise. Um, well, guess what? I'm another one of those kinds. You know, I said I was going to vote against the gasoline tax in 2019. That was a hot issue on the 2018 campaign trail. I was very clear where I was gonna be on that issue. I'm a no on increasing taxes, especially because 88% of my district said that they were a no on it. I did a telephone poll, got 600 responses. 88% said no. So my first vote as a legislator is not going to go against 88% of my district. You know, I was young, I was 32, but I wasn't stupid. Yeah. I knew better, and and I'm philosophically opposed to higher taxes. Once in the legislature, uh, I not only was I effective at helping restore people's constitutional right to bear firearms uh through the constitutional carry legislation I carried for four years, but I was rated Alabama's most conservative legislator three out of the four years that I was there. So you can check any of four different scorecards the American Conservative Union, the Club for Growth, um, Alabama Policy Institute put it put a scorecard out. All these different groups rated uh my social conservatism, they rated my fiscal conservatism, and I was always either first by myself or tied for first in all of the scorecards. Got a conservative policy warrior award in 2020 uh from the Alabama Policy Institute. So basically what I would say is you can trust me to that I'm going to do exactly what I tell you I'm going to do. If I tell you I'm going to put conservative Republicans on the board of registrars, that's exactly what's going to happen. Because I'm serious about election integrity. When Democrats, statewide officials were appointing registrars in this state, we had a lot of counties where there were more registered voters than there was population. We don't have that problem anymore because now you have Republicans doing the appointment. So people can trust what I tell them. I've got an eight-year track record and I've been very, very consistent. I I like to say I'm I'm Montgomery's most consistent politician. And I remember the former speaker, Mack McCutcheon, one day he I was in his office and and we disagreed on a lot of issues. But he said, Andrew, I'll tell you one thing. He said, I can always predict how you're gonna vote. He said, I'll look down the calendar of bills we're voting on, I'll say, Sorrell's gonna be a no on those two bills. And he said, because you you're just you're so consistent in the way that you vote. And I appreciated him recognizing that and saying that. And even though he didn't agree with my no votes all the time, um, he appreciated my consistency.

SPEAKER_03 28:42

That's awesome. And I think a lot of people don't realize, too, that there is sort of um I've worked in politics for a long time in another state, but it bodes well when you have a track record and you have that trajectory of not just shooting straight to the top. I think you do sort of for me, it develops a stronger background there when I'm casting my vote when I see somebody who worked their way up from state rep to this position, to that position, and also has involvement with the party because I question, you know, motives of people that aren't deeply involved with the party sometimes if they're truly with our same intentions there.

SPEAKER_01 29:14

Aaron Powell You have people who get involved in the party six months before they decide to run for office themselves. And you're like, well, you're only here helping, not you're not here for the cause, you're not here to advance conservatism, you're not here to help get Republicans elected generally. You're here so you can get elected. And you know, when I joined the party in 2010, running for political office was the furthest thing from my mind. I mean, I thought I was gonna be a consultant or a volunteer. I never imagined I would actually be the candidate, didn't even know that I would make a good candidate, frankly. Uh, but you know, the more politicians I hung out with, the more that I helped uh run races and stuff, I finally figured out all politicians are just normal people. They really are. I mean, there's nothing particularly special. Yes, they may be talented, some of them may be good looking or whatever, but at the end of the day, they're all people, they all make mistakes. And uh pretty soon, the more politicians you hang out with, the less impressed you are. I'll just put it that way.

SPEAKER_03 30:04

Oh, yes, I know. We do we're on our, I think you're our 74th episode. So we were saying we're all about to hit 75. So it's like, man, it really humanizes a lot of the time when you see these different people and it gives us a really good perspective, I think, because it is intimidating when you first get involved, and then once you do it so much and you it's like, oh yeah, they are just normal people.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

No, no, that that's exactly right. They really are. You know, politics is one thing where you don't have to have any special credentials to do it. And that's that's so unique. I mean, if you want to be a lawyer, guess what? Go past the bar. You know, if you want to be an accountant, go to school and study and be a CPA. You want to be a politician, you can be anything you want. You can be a businessman, you can be a preacher. There's some preachers in the legislature. Um, you can be a public school teacher, you can be a plumber. I got a plumber elected chairman of the Lauderdale County Commission. We beat the uh Chamber of Commerce president with a plumber because he was a genuine person. We went to the fish fry and our opponent showed up in a suit to a fish fry looking very stuffy. My opponent shows up, gets out of his work truck, you know, just got off work. We go into the event, we're handing cards out, and somebody says, the toilet's clogged. And we can't get it fixed. Toilet hadn't worked here in a month. Danny goes out to his truck, he gets his tools, he goes in, he unclogs the toilet. Danny left that day, I'm telling you, he had every single vote from the fish ride because the people said, Oh my goodness, he came in here and fixed our toilet for free. Rather than like, he came here to serve rather than to just grab our votes and leave and we never see him again. And watching people like Danny Pettit's campaign really taught me a lot of how you win locally. I remember riding around in a truck in 2014 with Rick Singleton. He was running for sheriff of Lauderdale County, and at the time we'd had a Democrat sheriff for you know 140 years, and Rick Singleton's running. And Rick Singleton would stop in at every little country store and he'd buy a Coca-Cola or a candy bar, and there'd be two or three people in the store. He would go speak to all of them. The person at the register knew who he was because that was the fourth time he had stopped in there, and we're talking about a county of 93,000 people. And I thought, wow, this is how you win. It's not going to the Chamber of Commerce events. So when I went to a political event in 2017, it was a North Alabama Council of Local Governments, NACOG. So you're going to have all your commissioners, you're going to have your legislators, you're going to have sometimes your congressmen will be there, you're going to have your city council members. They're all going to be at this NACOG meeting because it's all the local governments getting together and having a pow-wow. And I went in there and here I am. I'm 31 years old. I'm kind of a, honestly, I'm a nobody. I'm handing out my cards. No, none of the elected officials give me the time of day because my opponent is a community college president. So I felt like a fish out of water. So I told Hannah, I said, this is not the right strategy. I said, I'm going to go outside. There's some guys I saw grilling steak outside for the event. I'm going to go talk to them. So I got outside and I get talking to him. And turns out, oh, he's the president of the local paddlemen's association. Go figure. Four or five guys out there, I visit with them. And they told me at the end, they said, every other politician walked past us because we're just the guys cooking the food. They said, you came out here and actually talked to us. We want to support you. What can we do? And you know, I got 77% in that primary. Wow. And the 23%, probably the crowd that didn't want to talk to me, didn't want to give me the time of the day. But the actual like real people that live in and make up a district, the majority of people are not city councilmen. The majority of people, they they go vote, maybe, but they're not really political. And I always tell people look, if government's doing their job right, you shouldn't even be thinking about politics. You only think about politics when somebody is doing their job wrong. That's when you hear about it. That's when it makes the news. If your trash is getting picked up on time, if your streets are clean, if crime is low, you call 911 and they're there in two and a half minutes. You don't think about government. You don't complain about government. But when you start having boys using the girls' restroom in your local public school, now all of a sudden people get political real fast because they care.

SPEAKER_03 34:08

That's such a good point. I think that speaks volumes. And it also means a lot that you're here all the way in Gulf Shores and you're making the rounds and you're going out and you're talking to everybody. Um, you know, we always said that when we first started our podcast, we had problems with our county government and it kind of, you know, was able to see things, different systemic failures, I guess, all the way up the chain there. But it was all about being heard and being listened to and not overlooking those people who are sitting in the corner of the room, maybe not as flashy or saying something, and not overlooking the little guy there, because that little guy, you don't know who they are. They might have a ton of power and they might be the people that, you know, that person's squared, like they know multiple, multiple people. And it's it's crazy that people, I think candidates overlook that a lot of the time to focus on the one big wig in the room.

SPEAKER_01 34:52

You know, you never know who you're talking to. I was doing a tour for Bayshore Christian Academy, a local school here. One of the moms called me up and said, Hey, I heard you do these Capitol tours. And I said, Yes, I do. And I said, it's election season. I'm really busy. And she said, Would you please take the time to do a tour? I've got 30 kids coming and probably 30 parents. And I said, I can't say no. Yes, I'll do it. I'll do it. Come on out, I'm gonna give you an hour and a half tour of the Capitol. Which I'm gonna, after this air, so I'm gonna give a bunch of Capitol tour requests too. Um They come up, I do a tour. Well, I get talking to a guy on the tour, and he said, Oh, I'm friends with the Mississippi State Auditor. And we kind of hit it off, and he gives me his card, and um, he's like, Oh, call me sometime. So a couple days later, I I reach out and I call him. And long story short, he ends up donating me $10,000. I had no idea who he was, what he did, the the kind of success he's had and in business and everything. I had no idea. I just thought he was a dad there with his there with his daughter for the tour. So just goes to show you, you don't know who you're talking to. Be nice to everyone. Um everyone's vote counts the same. You know, a lot of candidates, they want to go get the, oh, if I can just get the majority of the county commission to vote for me. Who who cares if the count, I mean, I'll sure I'll take those votes count too, but like the the the people who don't go to any political events ever, those are the people who decide the election.

SPEAKER_00 36:07

Yeah, I've had so many instances where good things happen from specifically going to do something that I really deep inside did not want to do.

SPEAKER_01 36:16

Yeah, it's like you're on your sixth event of the day, you're tired, your baby's screaming in the car, and you're like, oh, maybe I should just skip this one. And you know, you're like, no, I said I'd be there, I'm gonna be there. You go in, and sure enough, you make that one connection you needed, or you find that donor, or or whatever.

unknown 36:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:32

There's there's a rule. Morton Blackwell runs the Leadership Institute in Arlington, Virginia. Conservative. Have y'all ever been there or heard of that?

SPEAKER_03 36:39

I actually have 17 certifications for the leadership institute. So I was trained through them, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:43

Well, I'm not telling you anything you don't know then, but one of his laws in the public policy process is never miss a meeting you regret missing, you might regret missing later. And that is so if I've ever skipped a meeting, turns out I should have been there. I will I would have been the key vote or whatever. So uh yeah, I I've learned I've got the laws and public policy process actually framed in my office, just so I remember them. But I started a leadership institute too back in 2010.

SPEAKER_03 37:06

So well, that's awesome. Do you have anything else you want people to know and tell people where to find you and remind them, you know, when to vote and everything if you would like to?

SPEAKER_01 37:14

Yes, I'll I'll say this. I'm sure your audience is all like, boy, this guy, he sounds good, he's done a good job as state auditor, maybe I'd consider voting for him, but they have one pressing question they still need answered. How do I know that this guy is patriotic? If if you if he could just convince me he's patriotic, I might vote for him. I'll have an answer for you. I have three children and we named them Liberty, Glory, and Justice. So if that doesn't convince him, I don't know what will. If that does, we'll have another one. So give me another political name and we'll we'll come up with something else. No, in all seriousness, the election is Tuesday, May 19th. I have one opponent uh on the Republican primary ballot. I I humbly ask for your vote, your support. Uh I've enjoyed serving the last four years. I want to do it again, and uh I promise you'll get more consistent conservatism from me if you put me back in there.

SPEAKER_03 37:58

Thank you so much for coming out.