Page 2 of 2 Previous Since their historic victories in the 2010
midterm elections, Republicans across the country have passed an
array of voting laws - to require photo identification, to make
it more difficult to register, to reduce periods of early voting
or to purge voter rolls - and they are considering others. The
Justice Department, the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, the Mexican American Legal Defense and
Educational Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union and other
groups have challenged many of these laws in court. A federal
court recently rejected Texas' voter ID law, and similar cases
from Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wisconsin await final
judicial action. Sound-bite analogies between these new laws and
the fully mature Jim Crow system have been properly condemned as
simplistic and misleading. But more careful study of the
experience of a century ago may offer a cautionary lesson about
today's changes in election laws. In the late 19th and early
20th centuries, Sout