According to a new report (.pdf) from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, they could affect more than five million Americans in 2012, “a number larger than the margin of victory in two of the last three presidential elections.”

From the Executive Summary:

These new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. This wave of changes may sharply tilt the political terrain for the 2012 election. Based on the Brennan Center’s analysis of the 19 laws and two executive actions that passed in 14 states, it is clear that:

• These new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.
• The states that have already cut back on voting rights will provide 171 electoral votes in 2012 – 63 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency.
• Of the 12 likely battleground states, as assessed by an August Los Angeles Times analysis of Gallup polling, five have already cut back on voting rights (and may pass additional restrictive legislation), and two more are currently considering new restrictions.

What the summary doesn’t say is that most of these new restrictions have been put in place by states with Republican legislatures and governors. Historically, Democrats have tried to expand the voting franchise while Republicans have tried to restrict it; the pace of activity ramped up considerably after the 2010 elections put Tea Party Republicans into office.

It’s anti-democratic as hell to restrict the right to vote, but it’s the only way Republicans can keep America’s changing demographics from swamping them. The Republican voter is getting older and whiter, while the American population is younger and browner. Also, urban areas are becoming minority-majority at a relatively quick clip:

. . . the regions surrounding New York, San Diego, Las Vegas and Memphis have become majority-minority since 2000. Non-Hispanic whites are a minority in 22 of the country’s 100-biggest urban areas.

The white population shrank in raw numbers in 42 of those big-city regions. But every large metro area showed a decline in the percentage of whites.

Urban areas tend Democratic, or at least they have over the past century.