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Billionaire Donates $1 Million To Fight Voter Suppression
Until recently, William Louis-Dreyfus was just another retired multimillionaire, giving his art collection away to charity and watching his actress daughter Julia on TV. He followed politics, but not to the point of actually doing much about it.
“I’ve never gotten involved in that way,” the 80-year-old businessman told HuffPost on Wednesday from his home in New York’s Westchester County.
But when Louis-Dreyfus learned that some Americans were trying to block others Americans from voting, he got seriously riled up.
“If something impedes the right of the people to vote, I can’t think of anything more lethal to happen to our basic principles,” he said. “It’s a damn outrage, and I don’t understand why everyone — Republican and Democrat alike — are not shocked to their shoe tops.”
So when New York Times readers opened the front section of the newspaper Tuesday, they found a full-page ad in which Louis-Dreyfus announced his $1 million donation to fight voter suppression, explained why, and challenged his fellow wealthy Americans to do likewise.
It was headlined, “A Call to Arms to the Wealthy to Protect the Right to Vote.”
The ad ran amid growing national awareness of the Republican voter suppression campaign and its possible effects on the November election. On the same day, a Pennsylvania judge temporarily blocked a strict voter identification law that opponents worried would have disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters — many of them minorities — and might even have swung a swing state.
Over the last decade and especially since President Barack Obama’s election in 2008, many Republican lawmakers have focused on making it harder to vote. The GOP takeover of several state houses in 2010 was followed by 19 new laws requiring votersto show photo IDs at the polls, rolling back early voting, and impeding the registration of new voters. Similarly, Republicans have pushed to purge voter rollsand are preparing to send pollwatchers to certain precincts. READMOREHERE
