To win reelection, Barack Obama will have to overcome “the worst thing that has happened to our democratic election system since the late nineteenth century, when legislatures in southern states systematically negated the voting rights blacks had won in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

That’s the considered opinion of Elizabeth Drew, whose award-winning credentials on political crime include covering Richard Nixon and Watergate four decades ago.

“This national effort to tilt the 2012 election,” Drew reports, “is being carried out on the pretext that the country’s voting system is under threat from widespread ‘voter fraud.’ The fact that no significant fraud has been found doesn’t deter the people pursuing this plan.

“Myths are convenient in politics. Want to fix an election? No problem. Just make up a story that the other side is trying to rig the election—-and meanwhile try to rig the election. (Jon Stewart recently concluded a searing segment about the imagined voter fraud by saying: ‘Next, leashes for leprechauns.’)”

The Tea Party’s blatant effort to suppress minority voting is fascism with a straight face, after eight states pass Voter ID laws requiring a state-approved document with photograph to register or vote, identification that an estimated 11 percent or over 21 million of American citizens, mostly minority members and poor people, don’t have.

This outrage is so clear that not only Jon Stewart but the season finale of HBO’s “Newsroom” have injected it into the popular culture.

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