Looking to capitalize on their historic gains last year, Republican lawmakers in several states are rewriting their election laws in ways that could make it more difficult for Democrats to win.

They have curbed early voting, rolled back voting rights for ex-felons and passed stricter voter ID laws. Taken together, the measures could have a significant and negative effect on President Obama’s reelection efforts if they keep young people and minorities away from the polls.

“It all hits at the groups that had higher turnout and higher registration in 2008,” said Judith Browne-Dianis, a civil rights lawyer who co-directs the Advancement Project, which has been tracking the new regulations. …WaPo

This effort went from spasmodic to focused during the Bush era when Karl Rove oversaw efforts to tinker with election procedures, state by state.

Pennsylvania lawmakers are considering the latest, and perhaps most potent, legislation, a measure that would divvy up electoral votes by congressional district rather than use the winner-takes-all approach. The change would almost ensure a net gain of 20 to 24 GOP electoral votes in the 2012 presidential election.

Here in Texas, voting groups are fighting new redistricting maps put together by a predominantly Republican legislature that dilute minority districts in an effort to reduce minority (often Democratic) representation. The case is now in court but no decision is expected until the end of the year. In the South — and that includes Texas — the Justice Department must review any changes.

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Nate Silver takes a look at Republican attempts to skew electoral votes may not succeed — thanks to Republicans.

The Constitution provides broad latitude to states to determine how to allocate their electoral votes. In fact, Democrats have little recourse in Pennsylvania at all: Republicans control both branches of the state legislature as well as the governorship. And Pennsylvania has neither ballot initiatives nor recall elections. Democrats simply have to hope that Republicans will decide that the proposal is not in their overall best interest.

Fortunately for Democrats, the proposal is already drawing objections from some Republicans. And it’s easy enough to see why: there are all sorts of downsides to this plan for Pennsylvania Republicans. …

…My guess is that they will not be able to keep their coalition together: it’s not clear if this plan is in their best interests.

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Ruth Marcus, in the Post, points to efforts on the left to take the Constitution back.

Tea Party types and other conservatives talk about how they’d like their country back. I’d like my Constitution back.

Liberal groups are zeroing on conservative claims of a greater knowledge of how the “framers” meant the Constitution to be read. Conservative efforts to reframe the meaning of the Constitution are finally running into a wall. Their argument, Marcus writes, “is, at bottom, an argument against the 20th century — specifically against the notion that the Constitution envisions and empowers a muscular federal government able to ensure that its citizens have clean air, healthy food and safe workplaces.”

… The emergence of the constitutional conservative argument has real-world consequences — even without a constitutional conservative in the White House. It shifts the legal debate significantly rightward, energizing and empowering conservative judges and justices. And it changes the nature of the political debate as well by narrowing the turf on which, at least in the view of some lawmakers, the federal government is deemed authorized to operate.

Cross posted from the blog Prairie Weather.