Is to own it. One of the great benefits of anti-immigrant hysteria has been the ability to enact discriminatory regulations to prevent people from being registered. The registration system already shifts the electorate in favor of landowners - it's part of this country's "one acre, one vote" system, which includes, among other things "compact" districts.

With Bush at meltdown approval - the brief relief bounce and bombing bump he got have faded, and the country is back on the firm path towards rejecting Bush overwhelmingly - as well as the congress he rode in on - it would seem that the next line of defense against democracy is by putting barbed wire on the road to the voting booth.

This is crucial, the voting booth is the last line of defense against civil war, and the first line of defense against tyranny.

One of the unheralded parts of the successful effort by Republicans to steal Florida for Bush was voter suppression. Republican voters got help to get their votes in and counted as absentees, Democrats were funnelled to the less convenient, less reliable, polling stations. In essence a two tier voting system shaded a close election towards those who owned the levers of power. Art Levine's Salon.com should be enough to make anyone's blood boil - and at the same time realize that the only way to salvage this election is to put pressure on state attorneys-general and secretaries of state to not enforce blatantly discriminatory and prejudicial regulations. However, people like Robin Carnahan, of the powerful Carnahan political family in Missouri, have said that they will enforce bad law.

But 2006 isn't 2008, Kathleen Harris parlayed her role in the constitutional coup of 2000 into the House, but she is washing out of her bid to challenge Nelson in this year's Senate race. This means that merely shading the results won't be enough. Lieberman's campaign should be a window into what the Republicans are planning. In the last ditch, Lieberman used accusations of racism, a false felony accusation and a burst of spending - while complaining that Lamont was trying to buy a seat in the Senate - to try and close the gap. A blow out race became tight.

If Lieberman can close a 13 point polling gap to 4 in a week, then the current 12 to 18 point theoretical polling gap could be closed as well.

The danger of suppressing the vote directly is that there is only one road open after the ballot box is closed - civil disobedience, culminating in disorder and possibly violence. It is still true that the right to vote is the fundamental right, without which people are no longer, "people" in the legal sense. The people are the sovereign electorate.

Salon's article has enough anecdotes to make one's blood boil, but the heart of the matter is what people took away from the media story of Florida in 2000. Voter suppression today, rests on media deception then. The media story is that machines were too difficult to use, but that felons fraudulently voted. That is what the ordinary person heard over and over again. The numbers do not back this up - what happened instead was, as noted, that Republicans were funnelled to a reliable and forgiving system to having their votes counted - including having Republican ballots fixed to run through machines and faulty applications for absentee ballots corrected - but Democrats had to face a time pressured paper system with long lines.

The result is that legislatures around the country have had a mandate to make the voting system less reliable and less transperant. While the level of threat to the integrity of the election systems by electronic voting machines is sometimes overstated by voting advocates - the cold fact is that video poker voting is gambling with an election outcome, because any electronic system can be hacked, and it is failry clear that voting machines come with more backdoors than tenament building.

The other prong has allowed legislatures, as the Salon article documents, to put higher and higher hurdles in the way of voting. Motor Voter, is effectively dead. Instead a system of taxation without representation is growing up - where the state's tax bureau can find you, but the state's elections board drops you through the cracks.

Taken together the new provisions that Salon lists, the questionable nature of the electronic voting machines, and the media bias in favor of the right wing - all one needs to read are the slurs hurled at Lamont voters by even some Democratic pundits - add up to a clear picture of an election which is, deliberately, being put out of reach of the voters.

This is an historical pattern. Periods of expansion of power of government are often followed by attempts to restrict the franchise, because those taking more power want to be sure that they, and only they, get to use the new sweeping powers. That this kind of coordinated and clearly intentional suppression of the vote is going on indicates that not only does the Republican Party know it is in trouble, it knows that should the Democratic Party take power, that the consistent destruction of checks and balances within Congress - for example the end of blue slips to hold judges and the disembowelling of the filibuster for preventing extremist judges - would allow a Democratic Congress to enact, even by slender margins, sweeping legislation. Legislation that could wash away in a matter of months what the Republicans have spent years pillaging from the Treasury.

That the Voting Rights Act sailed through Congress will be a very empty symbol indeed, if clear violations of the poll tax amendment are allowed to stand. That this is a state by state fight can be seen by following electionline.org with its run down of election laws.

It is my long standing position that our Democracy would be better protected with a doctrine of mandatory consent - that the government must go through every reasonable effort to insure that citizens are polled for their preference of representatives. Until voting participation resembles the rate at which people pay income taxes - which is to say, nearly universal - we cannot be sure that the people have spoken, or that they have been heard. This is the only road to legitimacy beyond a reasonable doubt - and there have been many very reasonable doubts about the legitimacy of our current regime in power. Doubts aided and abetted by the outright criminal behavior of representatives such as Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, Tom Delay and now Gary Miller.