Per Salon (and scooped from Raw Story), Republicans will suppress the vote in 6 states this November.
Those states can expect turmoil on election day with all-out efforts underway to harass minorities, purge voter databases, criminalize registration drives, etc. etc. etc.
Basically, after ignoring Democrats' efforts to create a federal uniform voting standard, Republicans are counting on their normal neo-fascist tactics to win again.
The anti-democratic Republican goons will claim to be authenticating the election and whatnot but they know damn well that some minority voters, particularly elderly black voters, can't produce "valid" ID, despite having several other methods of identifying themselves as valid American voters.
In this day and age, you would think that getting ID wouldn't be so hard but it is for blacks forced to be born at home due to these same racist's policies of the past, see the bottom blockquote for anecdotal evidence of this.
Republicans know all this and are using it to suppress the Democratic vote... again... just as they always have. Their despicable history of vote suppression, their Helmsian/ Allen usage of race-baiting, their anti-democratic history SHOULD disgust every God-loving American... but these bastards get away with it EVERY DAMNED ELECTION.
First, an excerpt from the Salon article, per Raw Story link below:
But Steele's plight has gotten relatively little notice from pundits and progressive activists confidently predicting a sweeping Democratic victory in November. Opinion polls show that a majority of the public wants a Democratic Congress, but whether potential voters -- black and Latino voters in particular -- will be able to make their voices heard on Election Day is not assured. Across the country, they will have to contend with Republican-sponsored schemes to limit voting. In a series of laws passed since the 2004 elections, Republican legislators and officials have come up with measures to suppress the turnout of traditional Democratic voting blocs. This fall the favored GOP techniques are new photo I.D. laws, the criminalizing of voter registration drives, and database purges that have disqualified up to 40 percent of newly registered voters from voting in such jurisdictions as Los Angeles County.
"States that are hostile to voting rights have -- intentionally or unintentionally -- created laws or regulations that prevent people from registering, staying on the rolls, or casting a ballot that counts," observes Michael Slater, the election administration specialist for Project Vote, a leading voter registration and voting rights group. And with roughly a quarter of the country's election districts having adopted new voting equipment in the past two years alone, there's a growing prospect that ill-informed election officials, balky machines and restrictive new voting rules could produce a "perfect storm" of fiascos in states such as Ohio, Florida, Arizona and others that have a legacy of voting rights restrictions or chaotic elections. "People with malicious intent can gum up the works and cause an Election Day meltdown," Steele says.
There is rarely hard proof of the Republicans' real agenda. One of the few public declarations of their intent came in 2004, when then state Rep. John Pappageorge of Michigan, who's now running for a state Senate seat, was quoted by the Detroit Free Press: "If we do not suppress the Detroit [read: black ] vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle."
For the 2006 elections, with the control of the House and the Senate in the balance, Salon has selected six states with the most serious potential for vote suppression and the greatest potential for affecting the outcome of key races. In nearly every case, the voter-suppression techniques have been implemented since 2004 by Republican legislators or officials; only one state has a Democratic secretary of state, and only one has a Democratic-controlled legislature.
And here's Raw Story's summation:
After votes were suppressed in Florida and Ohio during the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, Salon warns that four additional states could see voters prevented from casting ballots, with the greatest impact felt by Democratic candidates.
The report shows business as usual in Ohio where gubernatorial candidate and current Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has pushed regulations working to hinder voter registration efforts in the state. Similar efforts are afoot in Florida, as well as new authority for partisan pollwatchers to challenge the registration of individual voters.
But it is in four new states where Salon emphasizes new troubles might break out:
In Arizona, legislation that requires proof of citizenship to vote is taking a toll beyond the illegal immigrants it seeks to keep out of polling places.
In Indiana, difficulties in securing state identification have complicated the ability of many to register to vote.
In California, problems have been identified with electronic voting machines, and the consolidation of statewide voter registration lists is being used to bar voters from the rolls.
In Missouri, rigid ID laws for voters are seen to be targeting minority voters likely to vote against Republicans.
http://www.rawstory.com/...
And here is the anecdotal evidence I looked up:
Ruth White finally has her passport, so she doesn't have to worry about Georgia's highly restrictive new rules for voting. But it was no simple task. Since White doesn't have a birth certificate, she didn't come by a passport easily.
White, 84, was born at home in Asheville, N.C. She says she wrote the state's Bureau of Vital Statistics several times to get a copy of her birth certificate, but the office finally told her there was no record of her birth. She then called the school records office in Washington, D.C., where she spent her childhood.
"Fortunately, the person who answered just happened to be the daughter of a very good friend of mine. So she sent the school records, which show my birth date," White said.
With that and $97 she was able to get her passport through an expedited process last November.
White was highly motivated. Her grandson was getting married in Jamaica, and she wanted to be able to attend. Besides, her daughter, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, was on the ballot for re-election on Nov. 8, and she wanted to vote for her.
But White was annoyed by the hassle, she said. At the post office where she filled out her passport application, she vented her frustration loudly enough for others to hear.
"I said, 'I was born in this country, I have been a citizen for 84 years, I have voted since I was old enough, and here they are worrying me to death about some ID in this state of Georgia.' Some people laughed, but, you know, at my age, sometimes you just let loose."
If White, a retired schoolteacher, were less educated or less persistent, she may never have acquired the documents that allow her to vote under Georgia's new law. While Gov. Sonny Perdue and his GOP colleagues recently passed a new version of the bill that they expect to pass court muster Ñ it makes the photo IDs free of charge Ñ it doesn't make the process any simpler for many elderly Georgians. (The GOP-dominated Legislature passed a very similar voter ID law last year, but a federal judge ruled that the law likely constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax.)
That's no doubt what the backers of the bill intended to discourage voters who would likely cast ballots for Democrats. Perdue and his Republican allies insist the law is merely an effort to prevent voter fraud, but that claim is laughable. As Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Alan Judd recently pointed out in a detailed story, most allegations of voting irregularities involve absentee ballots. And the new law makes it easier to cheat using an absentee ballot.
http://www.ajc.com/...
It would indeed be laughable if democracy in America weren't at stake.