Robbed!

My daughter was robbed.  Her vote was stolen.

She lives in an urban area and has no need for a driver’s license.  Hence, she has no voter identification. Under new State voter id laws, she will not be able to vote. Thirty-two States are now involved with voter id laws-- either enacted or pending.[i]

My daughter is not alone. More than five million urban residents (most of whom would vote Democratic) will not have driver’s licenses and will have great difficulty proving that they are eligible to vote in the next election. Most will be so discouraged that they will give up and just not vote at all.  25 percent of African Americans and 16 percent of Latinos do not have driver’s licenses.[ii]

And, as it turns out, disenfranchising these voters is precisely the intention of the new State voter id laws.[iii] The alleged problem being solved was voter fraud, but voter fraud is so miniscule that it can almost not be measured, down to 0.0004 percent in many cases (Ohio); the number is 0.009  percent in the State of Washington where my daughter lives.[iv]

It is not about voter fraud. So…what is it about, where did these laws come from, and who is behind them?

A little online research answers the question. The laws were drafted and promoted by a little-known group call the American Legislative Exchange Council,  ALEC for short. Its founder, Paul Weyrich, bluntly stated his objective when he said  “I don’t want everybody to vote…Our [Republicans] leverage in the elections, quite candidly,  goes up as the voting populace goes down.” [v]

And who is Paul Weyrich? Now deceased, he was one of the leading strategists of the far right. He founded the Heritage Foundation and is described by the mad dogs in the liberal press as one of the far right’s most “unbending ideologues."[vi]

Paul Weyrich

ALEC is now funded by the Koch brothers and the National Rifle Association, together with a long list of other corporate supporters[vii]. 

ALEC is not only engaged in stealing votes.  They have a bigger agenda, among them the “Shoot First and Ask Questions Later Law” now in force in 21 States.[viii] This is the law that may have contributed to the fact that the killer of Trayvon Martin in Florida was not arrested. Whether Trayvon or his killer was the guilty party in that particular event—and many others--may never be known because, under the Shoot First and Ask Questions Later law, the killers are often not arrested.  Their guilt depends only on their state of mind when they killed, and who knows what that was?

It is worth a minute to look at the list of supporters of ALEC.  While some have recently left the fold in the face of new information about what the organization has been up to, there is still a long list of ALEC supporters.  Many of them are companies that you and I have been buying things from or have another relationship with, such as Fidelity Investments, Turbo Tax (Intuit), Wendys, GEICO, Coors, Chrysler, and United Airlines.

Why do these companies want more people shot by vigilantes and more voters disenfranchised?

Who knows what goes on in the mind of a corporate CEO?  For my part, I plan to terminate my relationships with those companies as fast as I can, and to write very nasty letters to the ones I can’t easily.

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[i] The statistic comes from  this video.

[ii] Id.

[iii] Read more here at the Color of Change page.

[iv] See the video in endnote 1.

[v] Id.

[vi] Bruce Weber, "Paul Weyrich, 66, A Conservative Strategist, Dies,” New York Times, December 19, 2008.

[vii] See the list on ALEC watch at this website.

[viii] This law is also known as the Stand Your Ground Law.