AFL-CIO blog -- Block the Vote: How Koch-Backed ALEC Aims to Keep You from Voting

[highplainsdem]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/10/17/block-the-vote-how-the-koch-backed-american-legislative-exchange-council-aims-to-keep-you-from-voting/

Block the Vote: How the Koch-Backed American Legislative Exchange Council Aims to Keep You from Voting

by Adele Stan, Oct 17, 2011


Across the country, voters in a number of states will face obstacles to casting ballots in the 2012 elections, in large part because of model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the organization backed by, among others, billionaires Charles and David Koch. It was ALEC’s draft legislation that inspired a spate of recently passed voter ID laws that, if allowed to stand, are expected to marginalize the impact of students and people of color at the polls in Texas, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Tennessee and Kansas. (Under the Texas law, for example, a college ID is not an acceptable form of identification for voting, but a military ID is.)

In a recent article published at The American Prospect, author Patrick Caldwell sheds light on ALEC’s M.O. For all the talk about preventing voter fraud—which was been shown to be a minimal threat to voting integrity—these new laws appear to be more about deciding just what kind of person gets to vote.

One of the most jarring examples of ALEC’s influence is the recent overturning of Maine’s longstanding same-day voting law by a newly elected Republican legislature. Maine’s law had been on the books since 1973, allowing the state to boast a much higher level of civic participation than the nation at large.

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Rock the Vote has a map on its site of where new laws designed to suppress voter turnout have been enacted, and is encouraging activism to overturn the restrictions and/or minimize their impact.

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Link to that American Prospect article:

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=who_stole_the_election

The Rock the Vote link:

http://www.rockthevote.com/campaigns/suppression/

Please read the entire AFL-CIO blog post, which has more info on these laws -- and the fight against them -- in Maine, Ohio and Wisconsin.

More on the harm ALEC is doing in the long compilation topic on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

[msongs]

1. alec = republican = anti working people = racist etc nt