Beginning in the 1980s, media companies began splitting shares into voting and nonvoting classifications and have come to be the dominant users of that strategy to centralise authority.
Realignment means the switching of voter preference from one party to another, in contrast to "dealignment" (where a voter group abandons a party to become independent or nonvoting).
The stock change would create a new class of nonvoting shares that will be distributed to existing shareholders in what is effectively a 2-for-1 stock split.