The controversial Arizona immigration law that President Obama's administration challenged came before the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday was written by the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC, the conservative group that has been in hot water recently for its role in drafting the law that has figured in the headline-making shooting of Trayvon Martin, the teenager gunned down by a Florida homeowner earlier this year.

ALEC  writes model legislation and with the intent of having state legislators pass that legislation into law. According to the Center for American Progress, at least 14 other states have considered, and in some cases passed, legislation similar to Arizona's SB 1070—a bill that gives state lawmakers the right to demand identification of persons they suspect of being illegal immigrants. The Justice Department is challenging the law's constitutionality.

Using automated textual analysis to identify matches in text among the 14 bills, Sunlight was able to identify similarities between the Arizona bill and a few of the other bills identified by CAP. The Alabama bill that became law in June of 2011 stands out as very similar to the law being considered by the Supreme Court today, and our analysis shows that it  is a closer match to ALEC's model bill than the Arizona bill is.

ALEC has lost some members because of its association with the controversy surrounding the shooting of Martin, a 17-year-old, in Sanford, Fla. by George Zimmerman. Zimmerman, who has since been charged with second-degree murder (he has pleaded not guilty) wasn't arrested immediately because of Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law. That law, which was adopted by ALEC after the National Rifle Association lobbied Florida state legislators to have it passed in 2005, made it hard for police to arrest Zimmerman because he claimed he acted out of self-defense.

Sunlight's work relies on software called SuperFastMatch. Created by the Media Standards Trust and supported by a grant from Sunlight, SFM allows for the identification of overlap between text documents at large scales and high speeds. You can examine the connections between SB 1070, the ALEC model bill and the other measures we have collected for yourself by visiting our research instance of SFM. Click the "Documents" tab to begin exploring the different immigrant-related measures we examined and their degree of overlap with those of other states.

An expansion of our recent analysis of Stand Your Ground laws confirms that an additional five states, and perhaps more, have passed legal language strikingly similar to the Florida law that has gained national attention in the wake of Trayvon Martin's death. In addition to the previously identified states, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Utah, and Illinois passed laws that appear to share substantial overlap with the legislation enacted in Florida.

Sunlight's initial analysis demonstrated that at least ten states had passed bills sharing substantial overlapping text with the Florida measure. However, our report was limited by the availability of legislative text, and we intentionally confined its scope to the text of bills that were enacted after the Florida law’s passage in 2005.

With research assistance from the Legal Community Against Violence, we expanded our analysis to include a wider collection of state-level self-defense laws, as well as statutory text in cases where original legislative language could not be obtained. As a result, we can now confirm that measures on the books in at least 15 states share meaningful amounts of overlapping language with the Florida law — one such example is the phrase “a person does not have a duty to retreat” — implying connections related to these laws' provenance and spread. This analytic finding is consistent with reports that the Florida law was adopted and promoted to other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council and the National Rifle Association.

Our analysis also hints at some of the origins of the Florida law. Illinois and Utah's measures represent earlier "Castle Doctrines." But these bills lacked some of the provisions of the Florida measure that are considered to be most problematic, such as the presumption of innocence for those using deadly force. And it was the Florida bill that appears to have been used as a template by most states that have since adopted "Stand Your Ground" laws.

Although our expanded analysis examined legislative or statutory language from 45 states, in some cases data availability remains a limiting factor. In others, laws may be substantially similar or share a common origin but lack overlapping language. Our analysis is limited to overlapping, identical text (we ignored matching text that appeared to be a product of short or frequently-used legal boilerplate). It is important to note that the 15 matches we located represent a lower bound; the total number of states that have adopted bills inspired by Florida’s may well be higher.

Sunlight's work relies on software called SuperFastMatch. Created by the Media Standards Trust and supported by a grant from Sunlight, SFM allows for the identification of overlap between text documents at large scales and high speeds. You can examine the connections between the "Stand Your Ground" measures we have collected for yourself by visiting our research instance of SFM. Click the "Documents" tab to begin exploring the different self-defense-related measures we examined and their degree of overlap with those of other states.

Some 24 states followed Florida in putting Stand Your Ground laws on their books, at least ten of which are nearly identical to the measure that’s gained national attention after George Zimmerman, 28, shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., last month and was not arrested because he said he was acting out of self-defense.

In 2005, Florida passed its Stand Your Ground law, which offers legal immunity to individuals who use deadly force when they believe they are being threatened by another. The National Rifle Association pushed the legislation through state legislatures across the country as an expansion of the nation's gun rights laws.

After Florida passed its law, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) adopted its legislative language as one of the model bills it proposes to legislators across the country on behalf of its member associations, in this case the NRA.

A Sunlight Foundation analysis using automated textual analysis  found that not only are the laws similar, but at least 10 of  the states based their legislation on nearly identical bills to the one Florida passed and ALEC adopted.

Because some states do not make the original legislation available online, there could be even more states that used what became an ALEC model bill to guide their legislation.

The analysis was able to detect striking similarities and identical phrases across multiple bills, including the phrase, “[a] person is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another when using defensive force that is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm …,” which is just one of the provisions of the law that is intended to protect people who may have killed another person from being arrested or prosecuted.

Michigan’s House Bill 5153 that passed the state legislature in 2006 was the most similar to Florida’s bill, according to the analysis. When compared to the Florida bill it returned the highest rate of matches than any other bill did at 146 fragments matched. The state bill with the lowest matching rate to Florida was Mississippi Senate Bill 2426 at 20 matching fragment counts.

The ten states that were revealed to have varying degrees of similarities to the Florida bill are:

• Michigan
• South Carolina
• West Virginia
• Kentucky
• Oklahoma
• Tennessee
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming
• Kansas
• Mississippi

The NRA hasn’t commented on the Martin case specifically, but has said the Stand Your Ground law is good legislation and to call it otherwise would be a mistake.

Florida State officials have said that it will be more difficult to prosecute the shooter, George Zimmerman, if they decide to do so, because of the law.

Breanna Edwards contributed to this post.

When Congress passed and the president signed into law the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (two years ago this month) they started a trend that has swept well beyond Washington. According to the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL), state legislatures are starting to emulate the new federal law that requires access through a free and searchable Web site to details on all federal spending.

Since 2007, 11 states (Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Washington) have established, via legislation or executive order, free and searchable Web sites that give access to state spending. And 24 other states are working on it, with more than half introducing spending transparency bills this year. B2G Exchange blog wrote in May that transparency Web sites were the "hottest new trend" in state government. SunshineReview.org is a good place to monitor progress of government transparency at the state and local level.

Kansas was the first to establish a transparency Web site by passing the Kansas Taxpayer Transparency Act in July 2007, and launching KanView on February 29^th of this year. The site is expected to cost about $40 million but it is estimated that it will generate $1 billion in savings. The champion of the new site, State Rep. Kasha Kelley of Arkansas City, Kan., has since become something of a traveling evangelist for government transparency. National and regional organizations, such as NCSL, the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Illinois Policy Institute, have invited Kelley to make presentations at their meetings and conferences. The federal Office of Management and Budget invited her to attend the unveiling of USAspending.gov, the federal transparency site. Because of Kelley's transparency work, the anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform named her a "Friend of the Taxpayer."

And last month, the Columbus, Ohio, -based Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a nonpartisan think tank devoted to small government in the state, launched its Center for Transparent and Accountable Government. The center says it will be collecting and posting online state and local government budgets, employee contracts, public records policies and other information. "Transparency and open government crosses ideologies and is equally supported, and equally opposed, by both major political parties," said Mike Maurer, the center's new director, a former statehouse reporter. He also said that Ohioans deserve the same type of transparency from their state and local governments that USAspending.gov provides at the federal level. In conjunction with its launch, the center issued a white paper gauging Ohio's current level of openness, finding that the state "is behind its peers in government transparency." They are asking candidates running for state office to take a transparency pledge. And they've set up OhioSunshine.org, an open government wiki. "The legitimacy of Ohio government rests on the consent of the governed, but that consent doesn't mean much when so much of government occurs hidden, or deeply buried," Hansen said. "Twenty-First Century information technology should be applied to draw back the curtain that stands between government and the people."

Amen to that.

The explosion of open government activism in the states is a very encouraging legacy of the 2006 transparency act.