The math for the election is very simple: The more black voters, the worse the results will be for the Republican Party and the party s presidential nominee, Donald Trump. As a result, the Republicans have a perverse incentive to keep black voter numbers as low as possible.And now it appears that Trump s running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, may be doing his part to emulate the Jim Crow south and bar black voters from being registered.Connie Lawson, the Secretary of State for Indiana, sent a letter to state election officials telling them that Patriot Majority USA, a group trying to register black voters were  nefarious actors  operating in the state. Lawson told officials to snitch to authorities if they received voter registration forms from the group. Combined with state police executing a search warrant against the group, it gave the appearance of vote suppression, according to Craig Varoga, the group s president.The publicity surrounding the actions taken by Lawson and Indiana s state police have cast a shadow over the nonprofits, with many stories accusing them of voter fraud.Varoga said the Oct. 4 police action prevented the group from registering 5,000 to 10,000 additional voters ahead of Indiana s Oct. 11 voter registration deadline. He s worried that clerks won t count some of the 45,000 applications the group had already collected.Republicans, as they often do in election years, have mounted an assault on voter registration drives and mobilization efforts. They have particularly targeted these efforts to minority communities. North Carolina Republicans were recently rebuked by the federal courts when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals declared most of a 2013 law invalid, since documents revealed that it was designed specifically to target minority voters with a voter ID law, and by banning same-day registration, early voting, and out-of-precinct voting.The judge in that case, Diana Gribbon Motz, wrote, The State s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise. In Indiana, the Pence regime seems to be working to do the same deed.Featured image by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr