At least for Federal elections.  We need a uniform, nationwide system of Federal voter registration and elections run, funded, and inspected on the Federal level.  

It wouldn't take a Constitutional amendment.

During the primary, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton got 2.5 million new voters to register to vote Democratic--and another 1 million registered to vote Republican. Sounds pretty impressive doesn't it? However, because of the new voter roll purge regulations enforced under the requirements of the Help America (De)Vote Act, between 4 and 6 million citizens who have previously voted will be unable to vote in November. Beyond that, up to 21 million voters may not show up or will be turned away because they don't have the proper ID to be allowed to vote. In the face of 25 to 27 million Americans who may want to vote but can't, the 3.5 million new registrations in this election cycle are a pittance.

http://votetrustusa.org/...
and: http://www.gregpalast.com/...

So what can the average Kossack do to make sure we return to a functional democracy in 2008?

As we ride a relatively optimistic wave to Election Day, fueled by reports of massive registration of new democrats this election year, its easy to forget the biggest hurdle is yet to be overcome, vote suppression.  

By now we've all heard the reasons Democrats have lost elections for the past four decades.  Frames.  Memes.  Defined by opponents.  Attack ads.  Political capitulations.  Weak on defense.  And crime.  And the voters are stupid.  Oh, and the media are biased.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that all of the above are the politics of mass distraction.  The real reason Democrats lost elections for the past four decades?  Just three:

Racism.  Sexism.  Organization.

Please join me over the fold....

Cross-posted at Project Vote's blog, Voting Matters

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

"Someone needs to the tell the VA that veterans don't check their citizenship rights at the door when they enter a VA facility," editorialized the Sacramento Bee on Sunday, referring to the continued refusal of the Department of Veterans Affairs to assist with voter registration. The Calif. publication urged the VA  to change a policy restricting voter registration drives before October registration deadlines for the 2008 presidential election.

Tim Griffin, a protege of Karl Rove, has been hired by the RNC for opposition research.  According to TPM,
his role will be to dig into Barack Obama's past for damaging information to use against him in the general election (Griffin is credited with finding material to "swiftboat" John Kerry).

This may very well be true, but there are no doubt many operatives doing the same type of digging.  Another possibility is that Griffin is being brought on to do whet he did in 2004: shepherd the RNC's vote suppression works.  Combined with GOP plans to appoint former RNC lawyer Caroline Hunter to the Federal Elections Commission, and I think we are witnessing the birth of another GOP vote suppression scheme for 2008.

Two reports on the Republican efforts to use "fraud" to suppress the legitimate votes of eligible citizens: In one newspaper, I received a confirmation of my suspicion that Indiana's Voter ID law was not serious about fighting fraud. In another was a story that the suppressors were now using fear of noncitizens to go after the legitimate voters who are too poor to get proper docs.

As has been covered extensively at TPM muckraker and noted by Adam B on the front page here today, the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) has been disabled by the Bush Administration's efforts to confirm notorious vote-suppression guru Hans von Spakovsky to the FEC.

Democrats rightly continue to block approval of von Spakovsky.  However, in another shameless effort to install Republican Partisans in influential positions in our elections bureaucracy, the Bush Administration has nominated for the FEC a lawyer intimately acquainted with how to suppress voters:

Caroline Hunter

A Katrina-level hurricane may ravage Indiana today; we have to be ready to report on its path of destruction through the state.  We have to make the real imaginable to those who are not there, just as we did in 2005.  This hurricane will pound at the pillars of democracy, blowing countless voters out of their polling places -- because they do not have the proper state-sanctioned photo identification.

Low-income voters, the elderly, and young students would be affected the most.  They are the ones who may not have needed to get proper identification in the past, or who may not have maintained it as current into the present.  The first two groups are those least able to take time away to work their way through the bureaucratic requirements needed for them to be able to exercise their most basic democratic right: an equal opportunity to vote on who will lead their nation.

A terrible lesson in voter suppression may be taught today.  We need to collect individual stories and make sure that people see it for what it is: the political equivalent of Katrina, in which the legitimate demand of the less privileged for protection is intentionally ignored, to widespread shock and outrage.

What do John Podesta and Julia Louis-Dreyfus have in common?  Both are trying to assist Women's Voices. Women Vote and their Voter Participation Center (and a cast of Clinton supporters and operatives) in a frantic attempt to put out the brush fires that are flaring up on DKos, Facing South, National Public Radio, The Economist and a few other outlets.

So what?  Julia is for Obama!  But here's where good people thinking they are doing good work get used by politicians to abet nasty and, in this case, illegal actions.

UPDATE: WVWV has this long story by Alex Koppelman at Salon on their own website.  Amazingly they are embracing the explanation that they are grossly incompetent rather than nefarious.  

More...

Now that we've delved pretty far into Obama's gaffe in San Francisco and his problems with Rev. Wright, we can ask how they stack up next to recent statements of Hillary.  Let's just take two:

The discussion I've seen about the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore II decision (aka Crawford v. Marion County Board of Elections) has tended to be abstruse and doctrinaire. I thought I'd come up with a handy guide on how to combat the various talking points floated by those who want to cloud the issue.

1. You don't stop vote fraud by making the fraudulent voters vote absentee.

2. One fraudulent vote equals one legitimate voter denied their rights--not a thousand.

3. Flying's a luxury, voting's a right.

4. Judicial Legislation isn't just when Liberals do it.

These may seem no-brainers, but they seem to have eluded the R. A. T. S. on the Supreme Court.

Just one day after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told Americans to "get over" the 2000 decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush, the Supreme Court today rubber stamped an essential tactic in the all-out Republican war to suppress the turnout of minority - and likely Democratic - voters.  By a 6-3 vote, the Court upheld an Indiana voter identification law purportedly designed to address what most experts deem a non-existent problem.  By so doing, the Roberts Court has guaranteed that the GOP's strategy of divide, suppress and conquer is alive and well in 2008.

The DOUGLAS COUNTY Democratic PARTY has decided to release it's county Caucus results
at 3 PM today.... well BEFORE many other counties will even have STARTED the Caucus process,
and especially before the western counties will Caucus.

THIS IS SHOWBOATING and disrespectfull of ALL other Nebraska Democrats...

 Update...

As far as I can determine, Omaha (Douglas County) will break for Obama
as which will Lancaster County, so announcing early would only have the effect of strengthening the expected vote of the second largest county
in Nebraska, as it was expected to break anyway.

Good for Obama forcalling out Bill Clinton.  The Big Dog is looking more and more like a junkyard dog as he lashes out in every direction.  It's clear he'll do what it takes to put Hillary over.  

Having the Big Dog as your attack dog gets more attention than any other surrogate.  But having him out there snarling makes it look like he -- and not Hillary -- is the candidate. And reminds us that if she wins, we could see 28 years of American history defined by Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton.  Enough with the dynasties, already.

Once again demonstrating its gift for fiction, the Wall Street Journal offered a hilariously pathetic treatise on the hate-mongering and intolerance of liberals.  Just three weeks after Bruce Bartlett took to the Journal's opinion pages to insist that Americans overlook the Republicans' racist present to instead focus on Democrats' racist past, Arthur C. Brooks in "Liberal Hatemongers" today argued that "political intolerance in America is to be found more on the left than it is on the right."  Sadly, the misguided professor Brooks is confusing liberals' current disdain for conservatives with the political strategies, tactics and messages of hate.  And that brand of hyperpartisanship and selective demonization of Americans is almost exclusively the province of the right.

Michael Mukasey may be right-wing.  He may be an obstacle blocking Congressional subpoenas of administration staffers.  He may have views of Presidential power uncomfortably close to John Yoo's.

But all of that doesn't mean he's not a substantial improvement over Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General on at least one issue: voting rights.

Friday evening, Talking Points Memo's Paul Kiel brought the news that another couple of voting rights purgers have been dismissed from the Justice Department.

As the 2008 campaign begins in earnest, one of the emerging storylines is so-called hyperpartisanship, the bitter and increasingly divisive conflict between Democrats and Republicans that is said to be fueling cynicism - and apathy - among voters.  In Iowa, Barack Obama proclaims that he will transcend partisan cleavages, while John Edwards vows to fight.  Meanwhile, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will meet in Oklahoma next week with prominent figures from both parties to encourage the 2008 candidates to form a "government of national unity." But lost in the cries of hyperpartisanship is the undeniable fact the Republican Party is almost exclusively responsible for it, aided and abetted by an "infotainment" media that has transformed politics into theater.