Here's an article about Republican efforts to suppress voting, this time in the guise of a lawsuit in Wisconsin. The Atty. Gen, who is the state co-chair of the McCain campaign, is attempting to make it a requirement that a newly established computerized voter registration record in Wisconsin must exactly match existing information on already registered voters. Since the new record was just compiled in August, it would be physically impossible to complete such a verification by election day. Here is an excerpt:
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In Wisconsin, Atty. Gen. J.B. Van Hollen – a Republican and the state co-chair of Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign — has sued the state’s Government Accountability Board, a non-partisan group of former state judges responsible for implementing the election laws. Van Hollen insists that the board’s failure to require that the identifying information which voters used to register matches the information contained in a new statewide voter database is a violation of the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.
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The federal law requires states to create a computerized statewide voter registration list that contains the name and identifying information of every legally registered voter. It does not, however, require that information on already-registered voters match the information in the new database.
For good reason. Personal data often doesn’t match — not due to any voter fraud, but because voters used a married or hyphenated name or nickname; or because of typographical errors by state workers entering the information into the database.
As a result, the handful of states that have mandated matching have found themselves facing a logistical nightmare. In Washington state, between 16 percent and 30 percent of registered voters in each county did not match the state database. In Florida, some 20,000 voters were denied or delayed in voting on that basis in 2006. Both ended up getting sued for making the match mandatory and so disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters.
In Wisconsin, after 22 percent of voters’ registration information did not match the state’s database – including data on three of the six judges on the accountability board — the board decided that trying to match everyone to the database by November would be impossible. The database wasn’t even completed until Aug. 1.
“To immediately require that every voter registered since January 2006 be matched against the state database,” Kevin Kennedy, the board’s director and general counsel wrote to Van Hollen in August, “could lead to mass confusion at the polls.”
Van Hollen has continued to pursue the suit, however, insisting it’s necessary to prevent voter fraud. “When unlawful votes are cast and counted,” he said when he filed the case, “the power of a lawful vote is diminished.”
THE EXTENT OF FRAUD
But voting experts say voter fraud of this type is extremely rare. “It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls,” the Brennan Center for Justice concluded, after conducting a comprehensive study last year.
Meanwhile, the Brennan Center’s studies show that rules like the one Wisconsin’s attorney general is advocating disenfranchise thousands of people – most often the poor, elderly and minorities.
In Florida, for example, where the Brennan Center sued the state on behalf of the state’s NAACP, studies showed that black voters made up 13 percent of all registration applicants, but were 26 percent of all matching problems. Similarly, Latinos were 15 percent of the total voting population, and 39 percent of those blocked; while white voters were 66 percent of the voter applicant pool, but only 17 percent of those whose applications didn’t match.
“The law inevitably leads to higher and heavier burdens being placed on less affluent voters and voters of color,” said Adam Skaggs, counsel for the Brennan Center. “So more of those voters will have their votes not counted in November. And as we saw in 2000, it can take only a couple hundred voters to make the difference in the election.”
According to my friends, a couple that are both professors in the history department, who are Obama volunteers, someone is going to call students each and every day until they cry Uncle! and go vote. 
