Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

From today’s CBS News Online:

More than 100 of the nation’s top corporate leaders met virtually on Saturday to discuss ways for companies to continue responding to the passage of more restrictive voting laws across the country, a signal that the nation’s premier businesses are preparing a far more robust, organized response to the ongoing debate. 

With some CEOs chiming in from Augusta National Golf Club, site of the Masters golf tournament, attendees on the high-level Zoom call included leaders from the health care, media and transportation sectors and some of the nation’s leading law and investment firms.  

“The gathering was an enthusiastic voluntary statement of defiance against threats of reprisals for exercising their patriotic voices,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale University management professor who helped organize the confab.  

The corporate leaders “recognize that they need to step up to the plate and are not fearful of these reprisals,” he added. “They’re showing a disdain for these political attacks. Not only are they fortifying each other, but they see that this spreading of disease of voter restrictions from Georgia to up to possibly 46 other states is based on a false premise and its’ anti-democratic.” 

The nonpartisan Brennan Center, which has been tracking voting law proposals across the country, found that lawmakers in 47 states have introduced 361 bills that would restrict voting access. Of those restrictive bills, at least 55 are currently moving through legislatures in 24 states. So far, 29 of them have passed one chamber, while 26 of them have made it through a committee vote. Overall, five bills have been signed into law, including Georgia’s in late March.

In the wake of Georgia’s new law, Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola and Aflac Insurance, among other companies based in the Peach State, spoke out in opposition to the law. Republican leaders, including former president Trump, have in turn called for boycotts of the companies for speaking out. Liberal organizations, civil rights groups and some Democratic Party leaders have said the firms didn’t speak out forcefully enough or before passage of the law, a move they argue that might have stopped the law’s passage.

Read the complete article here.

By Editor