Republicans Understand The Voting Lessons Of 2008 All Too Well

In 2008, Democrats saw unprecedented voter turnout among minorities, students, and first-time voters and won big, controlling the White House, both chambers of Congress, and a number of governor's mansions.  In 2010, Republicans sought to depress enthusiasm among those groups, convincing them that their vote didn't matter, and as a result they stayed home.  Republicans won huge at the state level and retook the House at the national.

The lesson for Republicans?  With dozens of Republican-controlled state legislatures ready to roll out tough "anti-voter fraud" laws,  keep young and minority voters from voting with Voter ID laws that target them, and you win.

"It's unbelievable, probably half the states in the country have bills in play and more than a dozen are seriously in the pipeline," Tova Wang of the left-leaning think tank Demos told TPM in an interview.

"It's really unprecedented in terms of geographic scope. I've never seen anything like it certainly since I've been working on voting rights issues that voter suppression bills would be introduced in so many places at the same time."

"Definitely students are a target here. It's totally clear to me that you saw in 2008 this unprecedented historic turnout among African-Americans, Latinos and young people -- and those happen to be the exact groups of people that are being targeted by these laws to disenfranchise them, and that's really sad," Wang said.

Wang said the most restrictive bills are in Ohio and Wisconsin, which Wang said require identification issued by the DMV. "Perhaps most interestingly, it doesn't even include student ID even from schools that are public universities," she said.

"This apparently concerted effort on the part of Republicans in state legislatures nationwide to effectively suppress voting is as disturbing as it is un-democratic," said Carolyn Fiddler, spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, an arm of the Democratic Party charged with boosting the number of Democrats in state governments. "Additionally, these restrictive measures are often costly and do nothing to balance state budgets and create jobs, which are the top priorities in statehouses across the country right now."

So with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, could a federal bill be far off? That's what Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) indicated in an interview with KTXS News. But Neugebauer spokesman Matt Crow told TPM the congressman "misspoke" and that there was "no such bill on the horizon."

Rep. Gregg Harper (R-MS), chairman of House Subcommittee on Elections, held a hearing this week to examine reports of voting by non-citizens and raised the specter of voter fraud.

"Congress often focuses on increasing access to voter registration -- making it easier for everyone to participate in elections," Harper said in a statement. "And that is a goal that we must continuously pursue; however, we must also ensure that easing access to voter registration isn't also, inadvertently, increasing vulnerabilities to voter fraud."

The bottom line is that whenever you hear Republicans complain about "voter fraud", they are complaining that it's too easy for groups that tend to vote more Democratic to vote and want to put in additional hoops to jump through in order to place financial or bureaucratic barriers to voting in front of the poor, minorities, students, and the elderly.

By restricting acceptable voters only to those who have current state issued drivers licenses or IDs, passports, or military IDs, Republicans are protecting America's voting system from those who don't have the money to pay for these IDs.  That would be violating poll tax laws, but the voter ID bills get around these by providing for waivers for the fee to purchase state IDs...by putting the burden of proof that the fee should be waived on the prospective voter and not the state.

It's very clever, and very much designed to eliminate as many provisional ballots, student ballots, low-income elderly ballots, and minority ballots as possible.  Combined with continued disenfranchising efforts like limiting voting equipment in minority precincts, Republicans are setting up long-term disenfranchisement of traditional Democratic voter groups.

They know if they do this, and concentrate campaign efforts on winning the vote of the remaining electorate, they win huge victories.  The plan for 2012 is to make it as difficult as possible for the poor and the young to vote.

The 50 state southern strategy continues.