Digby has an article in al-Jazeera presenting an overview of recent and not-so-recent Republican attempts to keep the minority vote down in elections.

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.

It certainly has. When 38 states tried to enact laws curtailing voters’ rights, from restricting motor voter laws to requiring photo IDs to shortening absentee and early election voting periods this year, you can pretty much agree that the Republican party is still following this advice:

“I don’t want everybody to vote,” the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

This is antithetical to the accepted wisdom of 20th century America: that everyone over 18 has a right to vote regardless of race, color, creed, gender or economic class. It needs to be stopped.