Alerts from The Nation: You Read!

With Election Day around the corner, and concerns about another voting debacle of Florida 2000-proportions running high, as Katrina vanden Heuvel explains in Editor's Cut, Republicans in Congress have launched a new effort to create modern-day Jim Crow exclusionary practices through new voter ID requirements.

This effort comes on the heels of the roll-out of electronic voting machines whose vulnerabilities have been widely chronicled. In response, as Ari Berman reports in The Nation, Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer, Chris Dodd and Russell Feingold have introduced the "Confidence in Voting Act" to ensure that paper ballots are available at every polling place. (After reading Berman's post, click here to urge Congress to take up the emergency legislation before it's too late.)

(Remember, however, that no elected official EVER did anything to change the terms of art which were in place when THEY were elected. Nobody already in office wants there to be more voters, or easier voting, or better counting, or anything else that is different from the condiditons they exploited to become incumbents.)...