In 2011 and 2012, therefore, the floodgates for voter ID laws opened and “180 bills to restrict who could vote and how” simultaneously appeared in forty-one states. This proposed legislation, which “seemed aimed at low-income voters, particularly minority voters, and at young people and the less mobile elderly” was something that “hadn’t been seen … since the end of Reconstruction, when every southern state placed severe limits on the franchise.”70 Paul Weyrich’s ALEC was behind this well-coordinated effort. In 2009, the group, which was founded in the 1970s and views itself as advancing “free
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