[bigrun]

The name of the game, remember, is not voter prevention, but voter suppression, i.e., bringing down the numbers. In the last presidential election, only 63 percent of eligible voters voted — and that was the best showing in 48 years. Clearly, Americans are not overly enthusiastic about performing this civic duty as it is.

Remember: demographic trends do not favor the Republican Party. As the Center for the Study of the American Electorate observed in a 2008 report, the GOP is either out of contention or seeing an erosion of support in New England, the mid-Atlantic, the West, the mountain states, the industrial Midwest, and even parts of the South. With its growing Latino population, even Texas may be lost to the party before too many years. “Within the next few decades,” says the report, “white Americans, the only demographic sub-group from which the GOP draws significant numbers of voters, will be in the minority.”

So, while the party posits these laws as a way of fighting voter fraud — a nearly non-existent problem — it takes little imagination to divine a more sinister intent. Sometimes, you don’t need imagination at all.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/1...-is-voter.html