[lrtoinbert]

There have been a smattering of articles on this subject, but it's worth taking a closer look at the dynamics behind the very focused GOP effort to dismantle voter registration drives among the poor and to break unions across the country.

First, the union situation as viewed by Howard Fineman: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_828429.html
Last fall, GOP operatives hoped and expected to take away as many as 20 governorships from the Democrats. They ended up nabbing 12.

What happened? Well, according to postgame analysis by GOP strategists and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi -- who chaired the Republican Governors Association in 2010 -- the power and money of public-employee unions was the reason.

"We are never going to win most of these states until we can do something about those unions," one key operative said at a Washington dinner in November. "They have so much incentive to work hard politically because they are, in effect, electing their own bosses -- the Democrats who are going to pay them better and give them more benefits. And the Democrats have the incentive to be generous."

This is how top Republicans see the matter: a vicious cycle of union-to-Democrat-to-union power that they are determined to break. And the worst of Republican fears materialized in 2008 when the presence of a popular, black presidential candidate produced a groundswell of voter registration and actual voting by blacks, Latinos and poor populations in many states.

Here's one snapshot of the phenomenon from Florida: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/loc...,7473721.story
An escalating number of voters registering as Democrats is providing evidence that the 2008 election could produce a wave of support for Barack Obama -- and trigger a decades-long shift of party allegiance that could affect elections for a generation.

The numbers are ominous for Republicans: Through May, Democratic voter registration in Broward County was up 6.7 percent. Republican registrations grew just 3 percent while independents rose 2.8 percent.

Democrats have posted even greater gains statewide, up 106,508 voters from January through May, compared with 16,686 for the Republicans.

"It's a huge swing," says Marian Johnson, political director for the Florida Chamber of Commerce. "I looked at that and said, 'Wow.'" The Republican reaction, much like Barbour's assessment of the role of unions in voter turnout and campaign support, has been to strike out at the mechanism that makes voting among poor and minority populations as easy as it is for others.

Target #1 was to take out ACORN, who served poor neighborhoods with a range of counseling services and voter registration drives. Breitbart played along with a doctored-video campaign that GOP congress-people rallied around, eventually pulling all funding from the organization and creating enough chaos around its operations that they folded, hopefully to resurface under a different name in the next election cycle.

Target #2 is voter ID laws and same-day registration, which target populations that are not traditional regular-voting groups, which are the groups that the Florida article specifically talks about.

In fact the version of voter ID legislation currently backed by the Walker administration in Wisconsin would even forbid the acceptance of college ID's at polls, so if a college student (traditionally a voting bloc that trends Democratic) can't produce a state ID or driver's license when arriving at their polling place, they'd be turned away. Similar new student ID restrictions are working their way into law in Texas and Indiana.