30 states have laws in place requiring all voters to show ID at the polls. | AP Photos Left girds for voting rights battle

Democrats, labor unions and civil rights groups are convinced Republicans are scheming to steal the election from President Barack Obama by suppressing the liberal vote, and they’re girding for battle.

Groups on the left are spending more than they have in any previous election to lawyer up, get voters registered early and flood polling locations with trained poll workers and election watchdogs.


“We’re not going to be fooled again,” said Michael Podhorzer, political director of the AFL-CIO, which recently launched a new campaign focused on voter protection and registration in battleground states. For the left, he said, “a potentially naive mistake in 2000 was not understanding the implications of election administration and the extent to which Republican election officials can tilt things their way.”

In all, 30 states have laws in place requiring all voters to show identification at the polls in November, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The battlegrounds are everywhere: Pennsylvania voters are now required to show photo identification. Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed a law to ban in-person voting for the three days before Election Day. Last week, Florida GOP Gov. Rick Scott drew a lawsuit from the Obama administration for the state’s controversial attempt to purge the state’s voter rolls — which could result in tens of thousands of voters getting scrubbed from the lists.

Critics insist the laws are aimed at key Democratic constituencies, including low-income voters, students and others, and see a doomsday scenario in which those rules swing the election. But proponents of the laws say the moves aren’t politically motivated and are aimed at preventing voter fraud.

“Making sure noncitizens are not voting in our elections is not a partisan issue. It’s the law,” said Lane Wright, a spokesman for the Florida governor. Democrats are “trying to make it a partisan issue by accusing us of devious motives. We’re trying to follow the law and do the right thing here and that’s our motive.”

The AFL-CIO’s program focuses on Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Nevada. They’re all swing states with a whopping total of 99 electoral votes that Obama carried in 2008.

And they’re all states where a small slice of votes can determine the presidential victor. In 2004, the presidential contests in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Nevada and Wisconsin were all decided by fewer than 200,000 votes. George W. Bush won Florida in 2000 by just 537 votes.

The AFL-CIO is partnering with groups including the NAACP, National Council of La Raza and Generational Alliance and committing more cash than ever before to voter protection efforts, said AFL-CIO Deputy Political Director Julie Greene. The coalition plans to recruit and train poll workers and monitors in every county in the six battleground states.

The union is also beefing up its voter registration efforts, with the goal of raising its 70 percent rate of nationwide union registration to 75 percent, Greene said. That would account for about 400,000 more union voters across the country.

“What’s at stake is that to the extent the Republicans are successful at making it more difficult for supporters of Obama to vote, it makes it that much more difficult for him to succeed,” Podhorzer said. “That’s an open secret.”

“The right wing has figured out that one of the ways to win elections is to knock out voters, particularly people of less means who are not necessarily poor, but poorer, and older and younger — especially younger — and those attacks are worse than they’ve ever been,” said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America.

The NAACP has prioritized voting rights issues “higher than any other project” within the organization, said Hilary Shelton, Washington bureau director and senior vice president for policy and advocacy at the NAACP. “So much of the heavy-handed recklessness is all such a flashback to what we experienced in Florida, and so certainly this time we are catching these problems earlier than we did in 2000, thank God.”

The Communications Workers of America is challenging voting restrictions in Georgia, Texas, Mississippi, Minnesota, Ohio and Florida, and plans to branch out to even more states. Ahead of the May 29 primary in Texas, the union aired a radio ad with the NAACP berating new restrictions in other states and informing voters that they only needed their voter registration card to vote.

“Our active members are infinitely more involved on democracy issues than ever before in the history of this organization,” Cohen said. The impact of new restrictions will be “huge,” he said, and could lead to losses for unions’ allies up and down the ticket this fall.

National Democrats say they, too, are doing more than they have in any recent election to counter new limitations on voters.

The Obama campaign launched a new website called Gotta Vote aimed at informing voters about new ID and polling place requirements across the country and the Democratic National Committee is expanding its efforts to register and educate voters in states like Florida.

The DNC also runs the Voting Rights Institute, a permanent organization set up in the wake of the 2000 election to track changes to election law and offer guidance to voters.

“Any laws that unnecessarily constrain or restrict registration or voting, we oppose them,” said Will Crossley, chief counsel and voter protection director at the DNC. “Whether they come in the form of registration; whether they come in the form of cutting early vote time; or in the form of additional ID that no one has ever required before. We’re opposing all of those.”

For now, all eyes are on Florida. With 29 electoral votes on the line and a history of determining the presidency, it’s no wonder the Sunshine State is already the focal point in the feud over voting rights — even five months out from the November election.

The Justice Department sued the State of Florida over its plans to purge voter rolls. And Florida is suing the federal government right back, demanding access to a Department of Homeland Security citizenship database state officials want to use to identify noncitizens.

Even GOP rising star Sen. Marco Rubio has gotten into the fray, defending the effort by Florida officials to purge the voting rolls.

“I wouldn’t characterize it as an effort to purge Latinos from the voting rolls,” the Florida Republican told reporters. “I think there’s the goal of ensuring that everyone who votes in Florida is qualified to vote. If you’re not a citizen of the United States, you shouldn’t be voting. That’s the law.”