Guardian op-ed: ALEC is a "shady cabal...on a mission to shrink not just government but democracy"

[highplainsdem]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/31/republican-voter-fraud-fraud

The Republican 'voter fraud' fraud
Diane Roberts


Presidential candidate and angry white man Newt Gingrich seems nostalgic for the good old Jim Crow poll tax days: he has called for people to have to pass an American historical literacy test before they can vote. His colleagues on the anti-democratic right have not gone quite so far, but 38 states, most of them controlled by Republicans, are concocting all kinds of ingenious ways to suppress the vote. A new report from New York University's Brennan Center for Justice says that more than five million people – enough to swing the 2012 presidential election – could find themselves disenfranchised, especially if they're poor or old or students or black or Latino.

Hyper-conservative governors and legislators, working with templates produced by a shady cabal called the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), have pushed through laws to cut the number of voting days, impede groups registering new voters, demand proof of citizenship and otherwise make it more difficult to cast a ballot. Alec, partly funded by the John Birch-er billionaire Koch brothers and affiliated with Liam Fox's Atlantic Bridge, is on a mission to shrink not just government (which it regards as a cancer on capitalism), but democracy itself. Ion Sancho, elections supervisor of Leon County, Florida, and veteran of Florida's 2000 presidential election fiasco, says: "Every state that has a Republican legislature is doing this, from Maine to Florida. It's a national effort."

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama benefited from extended voting hours and early voting days, as well as rules allowing citizens to register and vote on the same day. It's pretty obvious why: students, the elderly, and hourly-wage workers who can't queue for hours without making the boss angry, tend to favor Democrats. Florida – which became a byword for Banana Republicanism and electoral corruption 11 years ago – has been positively zealous in attempts to restrict voting rights on the grounds that easy voting leads to waste, fraud and abuse. One lawmaker pitched a hissy fit, claiming that dead actors (Paul Newman, for one) constantly turn up on voter rolls and that "Mickey Mouse" had registered to vote in Orlando. State senator Mike Bennett wants to make voting "harder"; after all, he said, "people in Africa literally walk 200 or 300 miles so they can have the opportunity to do what we do, and we want to make it more convenient? How much more convenient do you want to make it?"

-snip-

Emphasis added.

More on this shady cabal, its efforts to suppress voting, and other harm it's done, in the long compilation topic on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

[salin]

1. We need tons of sunlight on ALEC

to the point that when a piece of state level legislation is proposed - if it can be linked (through its content/language) to ALEC it becomes toxic and thus DOA. That is its existence needs to become part of the public awareness - tied to the image of "bought politicians who let their corporate sponsors write legislation".

[highplainsdem]

3. I agree completely.

[tosh]

2. K&R!!!