A man claims to be Alabama's next governor while his tax returns, travel records, and voting history all point north of the state line.

"The question is, by what authority does a guy that lives in Florida have the right to run and be elected as the governor of Alabama?"

— Barry Ragsdale, attorney for the plaintiffs in the quo warranto challenge against Tommy Tuberville

The Alabama Constitution has a simple requirement for anyone who wants to run for governor: you must have been a resident citizen of the state for seven consecutive years. It is not a complicated standard. You live in Alabama for seven years, you run for governor of Alabama.

Senator Tommy Tuberville says he meets the requirement. A lawsuit filed Wednesday in Montgomery County Circuit Court says he does not. And the paper trail the plaintiffs are building does not look like the record of someone who has spent seven years in Auburn, Alabama. It looks like the record of someone who lives at a $6 million beachfront estate in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida, and visits Alabama for football games.

The suit is a quo warranto challenge, brought by two Alabama realtors, Brooke Lynn Dorgan and Justin Jude LeBlanc. The legal mechanism is designed specifically for this situation: it asks a court to determine whether someone is lawfully holding or seeking public office. Unlike the internal challenges that the Alabama Republican Party has already dismissed, this one will be decided by a judge, with expedited discovery, depositions, and potentially a jury trial.

The plaintiffs are represented by Barry Ragsdale, a Birmingham attorney who knows how these cases play out. In 2023, he successfully challenged State Representative David Cole on identical grounds. Cole claimed residency at a friend's house, was removed from office, and pleaded guilty to felony voter fraud for registering and voting at the false address.

Translation: Ragsdale has done this before, and he wins.

The evidence against Tuberville is not speculative. It is drawn from property records, travel expense filings, voting records, driver's license databases, and the senator's own public statements. Taken individually, each piece can be explained away. Taken together, they form a pattern that is difficult to reconcile with seven years of Alabama residency.

Tuberville owns no real property in Alabama. The 1,500-square-foot house in Auburn that he claims as his residence was purchased by his wife and son in 2017. Tuberville was not added to the deed until 2024, seven years after the purchase and barely a year before the November election. The complaint describes the property as being "in a state of disrepair and neglect indicative of only occasional occupancy."

The house he does own is in Florida. Tuberville and his wife have held title to a 5,000-square-foot beachfront home in Santa Rosa Beach since 2004. Legal documents from a 2023 Florida real estate transaction list that property as his primary residence.

Tuberville's Senate travel records tell the same story. Over his time in the Senate, he has expensed more than two dozen flights departing from airports near the Florida beach house, all paid for by Alabamian taxpayers. When he flies into Atlanta, the hub you would expect for a resident of Auburn, the paper trail goes quiet: no car rental receipts, no per diem requests, no mileage reimbursements for the 100-mile drive to Alabama.

His political action committee spending is equally revealing. Coach PAC has paid a Florida taxi and shuttle service over $11,000 in the past two years for airport pickups and drop-offs in the Panhandle. There are no equivalent transportation expenses in Alabama. No taxi services from Atlanta to Auburn. No meals in Montgomery.

The spending habits of a Florida resident who sends the bill to Alabama taxpayers.

Then there is the question of voting, which should be the clearest indicator of where someone claims to live. Tuberville voted in Walton County, Florida, in 2018. He was registered to vote in both Alabama and Florida simultaneously for at least two years, from 2019 through 2020. When the plaintiffs ask him to admit under oath that he voted in Florida in 2018, they are also asking him to address a federal crime: voting in a state where you do not reside.

His driver's license history does not help. Tuberville maintained an active Florida driver's license until 2023, while also holding an Alabama driver's license. That means for at least four years, he was officially licensed to drive in two states simultaneously. In a legal challenge about where he actually lives, having your government-issued identification say "Florida" is not a strong look.

The most damaging evidence may come from Tuberville himself. During a 2017 ESPN interview, before his Senate campaign, he said, "Six months ago, after 40 years of coaching football, I hung up my whistle and moved to Santa Rosa Beach, Florida." He has never walked the comment back.

More recently, in April 2026 at the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, Tuberville told an interviewer: "I go back to Auburn for 3 or 4 ballgames a year." When he realized what he had said, he quickly added, "Actually, I live in Auburn." The damage was done. A man who returns to his supposed home three or four times a year for sporting events is not living there. He is visiting.

Tuberville's campaign has dismissed the lawsuit as "the same tired residency hoax" and blamed Democratic gubernatorial nominee Doug Jones, accusing him of using the challenge to avoid discussing policy. Campaign chair Jordan Doufexis pointed to the Alabama Republican Party's unanimous ruling that Tuberville is qualified.

Ragsdale says he does not represent Jones and has been working on the lawsuit since before Jones was a candidate. He also pointed out what makes this challenge different from the ones that came before: no party committee is deciding it. A judge will hear evidence, Tuberville will face cross-examination under oath, and discovery will force the production of documents that have not yet been made public.

Among the documents requested are Tuberville's state and federal tax returns, utility bills showing power and water usage at both properties, automobile insurance policies, healthcare provider records, and names of moving companies used between 2018 and 2019. The plaintiffs also want to know how many nights per week Tuberville and his wife have spent at the Auburn house.

Tuberville has submitted partially redacted income tax returns from 2018 to 2024, but Susan Hamill, a law professor emerita at the University of Alabama, said tax returns alone do not prove residency. "What the tax picture shows is a financial tie to the state in having earned state-sourced income that is legitimately taxable by the state," she said. "It doesn't say anything more about the person's residency, citizenship, or the other indicators of resident citizenship."

The case is assigned to Montgomery Circuit Court Judge Brooke Reid, a Democrat appointed by Governor Kay Ivey in 2019 and elected in her own right in 2020. The plaintiffs have demanded a jury trial, and under quo warranto rules, all proceedings are expedited. There are 139 days until the general election.

Alabama has a long history of enforcing residency requirements, even when it is politically inconvenient. Cole's removal last year was not an anomaly: it was a reminder that the state takes durational residency seriously, and courts have been willing to enforce it regardless of party affiliation.

What makes Tuberville's case particularly notable is not just whether he will be disqualified. It is what the discovery process will reveal. Even if the case does not conclude before November, the depositions and document production could expose details that reshape the race. The public will see utility usage, travel patterns, healthcare records, and testimony under oath from a man who has spent years claiming to live in a state where his own behavior suggests he does not.

The Alabama Constitution requires seven years of residency for a reason. It is not an arbitrary number designed to keep out ambitious politicians. It is meant to ensure that the person running to lead the state has actually lived among its citizens, understands its challenges, and shares its daily reality.

Tuberville coached in Alabama from 1999 to 2008 and tells reporters that those years count toward his eligibility. But the seven years must be consecutive, and the evidence suggests his last stretch of actual Alabama residency ended more than a decade ago. After that, he moved to Florida, bought a beach house, flew to Washington from a Florida airport, voted in Walton County, and kept a Florida driver's license.

A governor who lives in another state is not a bug in the system. It is the definition of what the residency requirement was designed to prevent.