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This article originally ran on the AL.com website.  The original article can be seen here.

The indictment of 11 people, including four sitting state senators, in a federal probe of gambling legislation will set off waves of negative campaign advertising and could change the balance of power in Montgomery, political experts said Monday.

While it won’t be clear what it all means until the votes are cast Nov. 2, it’s certain that it will affect the election, and it’s likely the Democrats have the most to lose, they said.

“This is a big deal. This is a blockbuster development,” said Glen Browder, a former Democratic congressman and an emeritus associate professor of political science at Jacksonville State University. “Coming one month before the election, this has to play into that election.”

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ron Sparks has made acceptance of gambling his “prize issue,” said Bill Stewart, the retired head of the political science department at the University of Alabama. Undecided voters may now associate gambling with corruption, and lean toward Republican candidate Robert Bentley, he said.

Republicans likely will try to nudge voters toward that conclusion, launching campaign ads that paint Democrats in general as corrupt, said Brad Moody, an associate professor of political science at Auburn University at Montgomery.

In the fight over control of the Legislature, the impact of the indictments is less clear.

The four state senators indicted in the probe include two Democrats, one Republican and an independent. But, in the fence-hopping tradition of Alabama politics, the Republican used to be a Democrat and the independent used to be a Republican.

Democrats have the most to lose because voters are mad, Browder said, and mad voters tend to take out their anger on whoever is in power. Democrats control the Alabama Senate by a 20-14-1 margin, and the House 65-40.

“It will be utilized as an attack on the establishment, and the establishment is the Democrats,” Browder said. “It will make control of the Legislature much more iffy. It’s something the Democrats have to be concerned about, even though the Democratic party did nothing wrong in this case.”

Moody reached the same conclusion, though not necessarily for the same reasons. Of the seats held by senators facing charges, only one is seriously at risk of switching parties, and it is held by a Democrat, he said. If that seat were to go Republican, it would amount to a two-seat swing in a Senate where the Democrats hold a six-seat advantage.

Possible implications, seat-by-seat, according to Moody:

Sen. Harri Anne H. Smith, 48, I-Slocomb, faces conspiracy, bribery, extortion, fraud and money laundering charges. A former Republican who is running as an independent after being pushed off the ballot by the GOP for endorsing a Democrat, Smith faces an uphill battle as an independent. The worst the Democrats can do here, Moody said, is not win a seat they didn’t have to begin with. It’s likely to stay in Republican hands.

Sen. Quinton T. Ross Jr., 41, D-Montgomery, faces charges of conspiracy, bribery, attempted extortion and fraud. Ross was running unopposed. “He will be re-elected,” Moody said.

Sen. James E. Preuitt, 75, R-Talladega, faces charges of conspiracy, bribery, attempted extortion, fraud and making a false statement.

Preuitt had already dropped out of the race, and so the GOP likely will keep this seat, Moody said.

Sen. Larry P. Means, 63, D-Attalla, faces charges of conspiracy, bribery, attempted extortion and fraud. The indictment could make a difference in this race, Moody said.

The Alabama Democratic Party on Monday criticized the U.S. Department of Justice for the timing of the indictments, saying they may indeed influence voters.

“The Alabama Democratic Party is greatly concerned by the timing of these arrests and their possible collateral influence on voters only four weeks out of a major election,” the party said in a prepared statement. “These indictments were sealed and these arrests could have been made after the November 2nd election, because under Alabama law, any person convicted of a felony cannot serve.”

In Washington, prosecutors defending their timing.

“In a case like this, we had to go with where the facts and the law were and we had to make the decision at the appropriate time and that’s 100 percent what dictated the timing on this case irrespective of whether an election may or may not occur,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer.

Breuer also defended the decision to alert the Alabama Legislature of the investigation in March, before the House voted on the gaming legislation.

“We take absolutely no position whatsoever about the substance of the legislation. We couldn’t care less about the substance,” Breuer said. “After the Senate voted back in the end of March of this year, we notified the state Legislature of our investigation because we thought they were entitled to know about it, so they could decide to do whatever they wanted to do. So that’s when we went overt.”

Washington correspondent Mary Orndorff contributed to this report.

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Editor’s note: The date of the election is Nov. 2. This article has been corrected.