This is (Mostly) Good News

Republicans may be poised to beat themselves again. Maybe. Earlier this week, I wrote about a Republican effort to put a measure on the ballot to split California's electoral votes by congressional district-a move that could put twenty or more votes in the "R" column that otherwise would likely belong to the Democrat in the race. Well, thanks to GOP in-fighting, it looks as though California will remain a 'winner takes all' state in next year's fight for electoral votes. That's very good news for Democrats. (Thanks, Tom, for the tip.)

We may not be out of the woods, though. Efforts to suppress likely Democratic votes continue. Consider these examples:

Ohio and Florida, which provided the decisive electoral votes for President Bush's two razor-thin national election triumphs, have enacted laws that election experts say will help Republicans impede voting by Democratic-leaning minorities in 2008," McClatchy reports.The new Ohio law aimed at reducing voter fraud allows for "caging" -- "used in the past to target poor minorities in heavily Democratic precincts, entails sending mass mailings to certain voters and then using the undelivered letters to compile lists of voters for eligibility challenges." While Republican groups paid for caging efforts in the past, the new law makes the government pay for it. In Florida, the new law "stripped the state's 10.5 million registered voters of the right to contest challenges at the polls. Now a challenger need only swear to a "good faith belief" that a voter is ineligible to force the voter to file a provisional ballot."

The moral of the story? "Don't expect a fair fight."