At least it's the way politics has been practiced since the early 1980s, when Republicans first began implementing their most brazen voter-intimidation campaigns. In the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial election, the RNC and its affiliates devised a program that they claimed was aimed at reducing voter fraud. The party hired police officers to patrol minority neighborhoods in Passaic County and put up signs warning that the election was being monitored "by the Ballot Security Task Force." The plan was obviously meant to intimidate voters rather than secure the polls. When Democrats filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Republicans over the tactics, the national GOP and the New Jersey Republicans were forced to sign a consent decree promising to refrain from the sorts of suppression activities they employed in the 1981 race. (The election, incidentally, was won by the Republican candidate, Thomas Kean, who later went on to chair the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks.)

But the pull of voter intimidation was too strong for the Republicans, the math of suppression irresistible. In 1986 the party hired an outside company to conduct another ballot-security initiative, this one aimed at challenging the voting eligibility of 31,000 voters in Louisiana, the vast majority of whom were black. According to a 2002 study of voter-intimidation practices that Swirsky wrote for the Temple Political & Civil Rights Law Review, when Democrats again sued over the ballot-security initiative, they unearthed a Republican planning document that stated that the Louisiana program "could keep the African-American vote down considerably."

In 1987, because of that evidence, the RNC was once again forced to enter into an agreement with Democrats, this one requiring the federal courts to preapprove all of the Republicans' ballot-security programs. But as Swirsky reports in her study, even this order "did not end Republican efforts to depress minority voter turnout."

In the 1990 Senate contest between Jesse Helms and Harvey Gannt in North Carolina, the state Republican Party mailed out "voter registration bulletins" to 150,000 homes in minority precincts, warning that voters would need to bring a raft of personal information to the polls on Election Day, and adding, falsely, that a voter "must have lived in [a] precinct for at least the previous 30 days" to be eligible to vote there. The mailings also warned of penalties for providing inaccurate information to elections officials. The Justice Department later brought a legal challenge against the state party over the mailings and Republicans agreed, once again, to curtail their efforts to suppress minority-voter turnout.

You can guess what the Republicans did after that -- more of the same. In August, the People for the American Way Foundation and the NAACP released a report detailing the past two decades' sorry history of voter-intimidation efforts. The report reads like a chronicle of the Jim Crow South, except the dates are in the 1980s and 1990s, and the locations are not limited to points below the Mason-Dixon line.

In 1988 in Hidalgo County, Texas, the Republican Party ran ads targeted at Latino voters. They warned of prison sentences for non-U.S. citizens who go to the polls, adding that officials "will be watching." In South Dakota in 2002, the state attorney general devised an anti-voting-fraud plan that involved sending law-enforcement officials to question 2,000 newly registered Native American voters. There was no similar probe, the report notes, "to investigate new registrants in counties without significant Native American populations, despite the fact that those counties contained most of the new registrations in the state."

In Dillon County, S.C., in 1998, Son Kinon, a Republican state official, mailed out 3,000 brochures to black voters warning, "You have always been my friend, so don't chance GOING TO JAIL on Election Day! ... SLED [South Carolina Law Enforcement Division] agents, FBI agents, people from the Justice Department and undercover agents will be in Dillon County working this election. People who you think are your friends, and even your neighbors, could be the very ones that turn you in. THIS ELECTION IS NOT WORTH GOING TO JAIL!!!!!!"

To many African-Americans, the most notorious effort to disenfranchise blacks occurred in Florida in 2000. During the election, according to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Republican state officials "failed to fulfill their responsibilities." In the aftermath of the debacle, numerous media reports surfaced of organized efforts to keep blacks away from the polls -- tales of police roadblocks erected in black neighborhoods, of election officials asking voters for unnecessary identification, of people being forcibly turned away from the polls by police. A few of these stories were discredited. Yet when the commission investigated the election, it corroborated many of them.

Floridians told the commission that they saw police cars illegally patrolling areas near polling places. They testified that in minority neighborhoods, polling places were closed early or were moved without any notice. The commission declared that election problems in Florida resulted "in an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement, with a significantly disproportionate impact on African American voters."

Much of the disenfranchisement was caused by antiquated voting machines used in minority neighborhoods; while just 11 percent of Florida's voters are African-American, more than half of the spoiled ballots -- more than 90,000 of the votes tossed out -- were cast by blacks. But another major source of disenfranchisement was the state's erroneous purging from voter rolls of thousands of suspected felons, the vast majority of whom were African-Americans. The purging occurred, the commission concluded, as a result of the "overzealous" efforts of Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris to combat voter fraud. "African American voters were placed on purge lists more often and more erroneously than Hispanic or white voters," the commission also noted. Could it be, many Democrats wonder, that Hispanic voters were not purged because, at least in Florida, they tend to vote Republican?

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