Googling this morning, I discovered that ALEC's triggered some interest across the Atlantic. From Diane Roberts of The Guardian:
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.Don't think for a minute that's not the plan.
Roberts continues:
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.To make it more difficult for traditionally democratic voters to vote. Don't think for a minute that's not the plan.
Too bad there's no "voter fraud" at all. From the Brennan Law center website:
The Brennan Center for Justice has monitored and investigated claims of voter fraud for years. We have consistently found that accusations of voter fraud are amplified out of all proportion to reality, and that they frequently reach a crescendo when their appearance would assist one side in a bitter political fight over elections.But what of our lovely home state of Pennsylvania? The Brennan Center cites one bill in legislation, HB 934 as a "Photo ID Required to Vote" bill.
Remember HB 934? We wrote about it in June. Can you remember who's the sponsor of the bill? That's right, the sponsor of the bill is our old friend Daryl Metcalfe.
Metcalfe's a also member of ALEC.
No voter fraud but the legislation's intended to block democratic voters because the GOP claims that there is.
How they love Democracy!!
