Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander visited the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Cape Girardeau last Friday.
Kander’s visit was part of a tour of similar facilities around the state. Kander believes it is important to focus on entrepreneurship and business development at the local level as part of the economic development policy in Missouri.
Kander said it is important to recruit companies from others states, but he also thinks Missouri’s best assets are its citizens., and that is why this tour’s goal is to highlight places like the one in Cape Girardeau.
“The majority of Missourians work at a small business and so that’s why to me it makes sense that over time we should do everything we can to cultivate businesses that already exist in Missouri,” Kander said.
This visit was also the occasion to ask him about his thoughts on several Missouri legislation, like the Voter ID bill that was passed by the House this session.
Kander said he is opposed to any legislation that would disenfranchise a single eligible Missourian. He said the bill requires a very narrow form of photo identification, and said that if it is passed it would be the most extreme law of this type in the entire country.
“I think that we should focus, when it comes to eligible Missouri voters, on making their experience more convenient that’s why I support a legislation like early voting, 36 states have it, I don’t think it’s controversy or cutting age,” Kander said.
Kander added that his office recently found that there are 220,000 registered voters in Missouri who are eligible legal voters who could be disenfranchised by this bill.
Kander also talked about the letter he recently sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission asking them to require publicly held companies to disclose spending on political activities to their shareholders.
“Eighty-five percent of shareholders in a recent poll said that they want to have more transparency about political activity done by the companies that they invest in, and as the Chief Securities’ Regulator in Missouri part of my job is to look out for investors, look out for shareholders and that’s what I believe we are doing here,” he concluded.