The big takeaway for the GOP from Florida and St. Louis therefore was the imperative of blocking members of those groups from the polls by virtually any means necessary. Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which eventually crafted voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer throughout the United States, was brutally clear: “I don’t want everybody to vote.” The Republican Party’s “leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”26 That is to say, the GOP learned that voter
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