Three guesses whose votes won't count.
Digby has a
critical primer on the history of voter suppression in the U.S. and you should go read it now. It includes former Chief Justice William Rehnquist preparing for his role in deciding the 2000 presidential election by bullying African American voters at a polling place in Phoenix, Arizona in 1964.
The history of the GOP's efforts to keep as many as people out of the polls, digby reminds us, is long. But the remarkable efforts of the Bush administration gave the effort impetus that's going to be difficult to break.
The Bush Department of Justice more or less closed down the civil rights division, which had monitored compliance with the Voting Rights Act. It even concocted an illegal scheme to replace US Attorneys who refused to flout laws and Department of Justice rules against interfering in elections.
The federal courts, which had been packed with GOP judges for decades, began to rule in favor of "Voter ID" laws on the basis of claims of systemic voter fraud for which there was no documented evidence. More states found reasons to deny the vote to people convicted of breaking the law, even after they had paid their debt to society. "ACORN" became a euphemism for inner-city voter fraud.
Little by little, it became more and more difficult to exercise for people of colour, immigrants, the elderly and the poor to exercise their franchise. The resultant red tape and bureaucratic delays have made it more difficult for working people to vote as well. It's hard to believe that it could get any worse than that, but it has.[...]
Hubert Humphrey famously said, "It is not enough to merely defend democracy. To defend it may be to lose it; to extend it is to strengthen it. Democracy is not property; it is an idea". If that is true, it's an idea that has become nothing but an inconvenient abstraction to the Republican side of the aisle. Extending democracy is beyond our wildest dreams at the moment, as conservatives work overtime to make it harder for average citizens to vote, instead of easier. Defending democracy is the only option we have.
This is the project that every Democratic (and democratic) organization in the country should be working on now. Republican legislators, governors and secretaries of state in a dozen states have passed legislation in just the last three years to make it much harder, if not impossible, for Americans to vote. Efforts to restrict voting have been introduced in 38 states. All of it designed to keep would-be Democratic voters from the polls, and, incidentally, to get the black president out of the White House. But that's just the immediate goal. The long-term one is to restrict voting as much as possible to the people who will vote for Republicans.
Campus Progress has been tracking voter suppression efforts in the states, as has the Brennan Center for Justice. You can use these resources as a starting point for finding the requirements for voting in your state. More importantly, you can start working with your local and state Democrats to prepare for the 2012 vote by knowing the laws in your state and working to make sure that the voters they target are able to exercise their franchise.