How Republicans Quietly Hijacked the Justice Department to Swing Elections

By Steven Rosenfeld, Ig Publishing
Posted on April 15, 2008, Printed on April 15, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/82348/

The following is an excerpted chapter by Steve Rosenfeld from the new book "Loser Take All," edited by Mark Crispin Miller (Ig Publishing, 2008).

Jim Crow has returned to American elections, only in the twenty-first century, instead of men in white robes or a barrel-chested sheriff menacingly patrolling voting precincts, we are more likely to see a lawyer carrying a folder filled with briefing papers and proposed legislation about "voter fraud" and other measures to supposedly protect the sanctity of the vote.

Since the 2004 election, activist lawyers with ties to the Republican Party and its presidential campaigns, Republican legislators, and even the Supreme Court -- in a largely unnoticed ruling in 2006 -- have been aggressively regulating most aspects of the voting process. Collectively, these efforts are undoing the gains of the civil rights era that brought voting rights to minorities and the poor, groups that tend to support Democrats.