Letter to the Editor: Rebuff un-American voting-manipulation bills

Talk about it

All the voting-manipulation bills before this Legislature should be swiftly rebuffed. They are unneeded and un-American.

An excellent Feb. 6 news story reported that North Dakota’s handling of elections was ranked first among the states by the Pew Charitable Trusts Elections Performing Index. So, even if these rule-changing bills weren’t obvious vote-suppressing schemes, common sense dictates that making any change to our state’s top-performing system can only degrade it.

Truth is, if enacted, these bills would make it harder for North Dakotans to vote. Worse yet, their provisions are closely aligned with the voter-suppression agenda of ALEC, a secretive, rabidly right-wing group waging a systematic campaign to pass laws that would make it harder for millions of Americans to vote.

ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) is a corporate bill mill largely funded by huge corporations and their billionaire executives, notably including the Koch brothers who bankrolled the increasingly-discredited tea party. Through ALEC, global corporations ghostwrite boilerplate bills on various topics, with one common goal: increasing corporate profits.

Across the country, ALEC-affiliated state legislators, including many in North Dakota, sponsor and promote ALEC’s “model bills” to weaken public health, safety and environmental protections; strategically suppress voting; privatize public schools; reduce corporate taxation and offshore U.S. jobs.

Chances are most of the North Dakotans who voted in the super-majority of Republican legislators didn’t realize they were electing a slew of shills for an out-of-state corporate agenda. ALEC’s fingerprints are all over the batch of vote-suppressing bills in the Bismarck hopper, many of whose sponsors are dues-paying members of ALEC.

Vicki Voldal Rosenau,

Valley City

Tags: voting manipulation, opinion