Barack Obama's campaign is busy registering thousands of new voters in hopes of broadening their political base to communities generally underrepresented in electoral politics. Targeting potential Democratic voters is self-serving, sure, but nobody would argue that improving civic engagement is bad for the nation. Meanwhile, John McCain and his fellow Republican operatives would rather disenfranchise new voters, as the Wall Street Journal's Corey Dade and John D. McKinnon report:
As Barack Obama tries to draw hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls, Republicans are beginning to scrutinize registrants' eligibility as both sides draw a major battle line over voting rights.
Republicans are moving to examine surges in voter registrations in some states. A Republican lawyers group held a national training session on election law over the weekend that included campaign attorneys for Sen. John McCain and other Republican leaders. One session discussed how party operatives can identify and respond to instances of voter fraud.
Republicans are said to be targeting the voter rolls in the battleground states of Virginia and Pennsylvania, despite no evidence of widespread fraud so far. In fact, as the Journal noted, "numerous studies have found fraud and other voting irregularities in past elections to be infrequent and generally not prevalent enough to influence the outcomes of most contests." In its decision to support a Voter ID law in Indiana, the Supreme Court documented the purportedly rampant voter fraud problem by citing an anecdote from 1868 as well as a single example of in-person fraud committed in Washington in 2004.
Thankfully, Obama is prepared for the legal onslaught. General counsel Bob Bauer says the campaign is setting up an "unprecedented" new Voter Protection Program that will work closely with the national party, which has spent three years on efforts to preserve voter rights, building a team of 18 paid staff and 7,000 lawyers.
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