He knew. He said so. He voted for it anyway. Tommy Tuberville, now the frontrunner for Alabama governor, privately told the Washington Examiner back in mid-2025 that the House’s SNAP provision would “financially hammer” red states like Alabama — his exact words were “just don’t bankrupt us.” Weeks later he voted YES on the Big Beautiful Bill anyway, then put out a statement calling it the road to a “Great” America. Ever since, he and his fellow Republicans, have spent a year blaming SNAP “fraud” for a mess their own votes helped create. Here’s the receipt on that “fraud” claim: Alabama’s own DHR Commissioner, Nancy Buckner, said it herself — error rates aren’t fraud, fraud is a tiny sliver of it. Michael Ledger, CEO of Feeding the Gulf Coast, backed that up too, telling AL.com that fraud only runs “1 percent to 2 percent” of what’s actually being penalized here. So the “SNAP is overrun with fraud” line Tuberville’s been running for over a year doesn’t hold up against the numbers his own state is working with. What it actually means for Alabama: a 9.52% payment error rate puts the state in the 10% cost-share bracket, which comes out to roughly $174 million state lawmakers have to find in the FY2027 budget. If they can’t or won’t find it, the options on the table are cutting people off SNAP or dropping the program entirely — real consequences for a program error rate that has nothing to do with fraud. Tuberville’s team is now quietly working with the state agency to bring that error rate down before the bill comes due, and lobbying alongside Katie Britt for a two-year delay. None of this is happening to Alabama. Tuberville voted for it, knowing what it would do, then spent a year pointing at “fraud” instead of his own vote. Now he’s the frontrunner for governor, running to fix a hole in the state budget that he dug himself.