Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch finally got their way in 2011. After their decades of funding the American Legislative Exchange Council the collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative state legislators, the project began finally to yield the intended result.
ALEC has been organizing, promoting, and encouraging its legislative associates in every state of the Union to enact its rigid voter photo ID legislation. This year, ALEC's model voter photo ID legislation was signed into law by Kansas, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Texas and South Carolina. ALEC's model voter photo ID legislation was initially enacted Georgia and Indiana.
The voter photo ID legislation specifies voters must present one of a very limited selection of dated and non-expired government issued photo ID cards that millions of American citizens do not possess. Citizens, who do not drive and never board a plane, and therefore lack identification required to vote, must obtain their certified birth certificate and other identity documents and travel to a state Driver's License Office to obtain a voter identification card. Acquiring the identity documents needed to obtain a voting identity document and taking time off work to travel to the nearest Driver's License Office, which typically have long waiting lines, can cost tens to hundreds of dollars. This cost to vote imposed on millions of American citizens who do not own or drive a car is a new variation on an old evil: the poll tax.
“For nearly a century, there were Jim Crow laws in place that discouraged people of color from voting, says Wade Henderson, the president and CEO of the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights. “Today, there are different laws, but the objective is the same—to prevent millions from exercising their right to vote."
MILWAUKEE, Wis. – The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Wisconsin and the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty today filed a federal lawsuit charging that Wisconsin’s voter ID law is unconstitutional and will deprive citizens of their basic right to vote. The lawsuit is the only active federal challenge against a voter ID law, the most common type of legislation that is part of a nationwide attack on the right to vote.