CALL it the "no representation without taxation" shtick.

Lexington has been in Pennsylvania this week (and Texas too, but that is for another day), looking at the science/art of get-out-the-vote efforts, and their dark cousin, namely efforts to suppress the votes of the other side.

Democrats are pretty convinced that voter suppression is precisely what their Republican foes are up to, via a new law (currently facing legal challenges before the courts) that requires voters to show an up-to-date identity card with a photograph and expiry date, issued by one of a list of official authorities. To Democrats and a coalition of civil-liberties and civil-rights groups, the idea is to disenfranchise those voters most likely to lack a drivers' licence or other official ID, namely low-income black and Hispanic residents of Philadelphia, where many locals use public transport and do not drive, as well as the elderly in that city. Their exhibit A is a recording from earlier this year of Mike Turzai, the Republican majority leader in the Pennsylvania state house, boasting about his party's recent achievements. Coming to the voter-ID law, he told a friendly crowd that it "is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania".

To understand why that might possibly be true, consider that Pennsylvania is almost two states politically, with a densely-populated, racially diverse southeastern corner round Philadelphia that is a one-party fiefdom for the Democrats, a few more strongly Democratic urban areas and then large swathes of conservative, white, rural and coal-mining country that often feels more like it could be way to the south (Pennsyltucky, as the interior of the state is known to both friends and enemies). In 2008, Barack Obama won Pennsylvania by some 620,000 votes, almost 600,000 of them from Philadelphia.

Republican state politicians who sponsored the new ID law say it is necessary to end what they say is rampant voter fraud. They note that modern life requires citizens to show IDs to buy cough syrup, so why not require them to vote? It is true that in polls, Pennsylvanians support new voter-ID controls, though the results are heavily skewed along partisan lines. A new poll by Mercyhurst University shows that overall, 57% of Pennsylvanians support the voter-ID law. But when broken down by party, what that actually means is that 90% of Republicans support the new law, while only 31% of Democrats do. Still more starkly, 64% of Democrats think the laws unfairly target disadvantaged people, but only 9% of Republicans agree.

This is a blog posting based on some preliminary reporting, and does not pretend to be a full-scale investigation of Pennsylvania voting. But talking to elected politicians, state-party bosses, pollsters, political scientists, commentators and community groups, some interesting ironies jumped out at me.

Start with that shtick mentioned at the start. The Republican prime sponsor of the voter-ID law in the Pennsylvania state legislature, Daryl Metcalfe, has been in the local headlines this week after linking his campaign for tougher election rules with Mitt Romney's comments conflating the roughly half of the country who do not pay federal income taxes with the roughly half of the country who reliably vote Democrat (a conflation which works if you ignore tens of millions of low-income Republicans and wealthy Democrats).

I telephoned Mr Metcalfe in Harrisburg. The intent of the law is to ensure that not one legally-cast vote is cancelled out by the forces of corruption, Mr Metcalfe told me. There is lots of fraud in Philadelphia elections, he went on, and besides, those "whining" about lacking voter ID through their representatives in the ACLU or other groups quickly get ID cards. Mr Metcalfe does not believe that any voter who embraces their responsibilities and seeks a card will be denied one, and charges that left-wing groups are happy to defend voter fraud because they fear the authentic will of the people. Republicans believe that God-given rights come with responsibilities. Others do not, he suggests, telling me:

It's not even debatable that certain individuals in society have an entitlement mentality, and think they should be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their neighbours' labours. If they are too lazy to do what they have to do to secure that ID, that is not the state's responsibility. The state can't fix lazy.

In short, Mr Metcalfe speaks for that slice of conservative opinion fearful that a great mass of subsidised welfare leeches stands ready to overwhelm the hard-working, self-supporting votes of conservative citizens.

But here is the thing, I suggested to Mr Metcalfe. The poorest and least educated are overwhelmingly Democrats when asked, but—far from comprising Barack Obama’s base—they mostly do not vote (less than 40% of adult high-school drop-outs voted in 2008, for instance, and about 50% of the unemployed).

America—a land that takes its liberties seriously—is unlikely to copy Belgium or Australia and adopt compulsory voting. But if it did, Mr Obama would romp home in November. Are you not in fact lucky that so many welfare recipients do not vote, I asked him? He did not agree.

The law has galvanised voluntary groups, including the Committee of Seventy, a clean-government watchdog run and funded by Philadelphia’s business elite since 1904 as a counterweight to a Democratic-dominated city political machine. The board of the committee is crammed with CEOs and bosses from law firms, and includes many rock-ribbed Republicans. When the board first considered the voter-ID law, it struggled to see why it might want to intervene, Ed Lovelidge, the board chairman of the Committee of Seventy told me. "We all have IDs, who doesn't have IDs in today's world?" he noted. But then board members began to think about their elderly, non-driving parents, or people in Philadelphia who use buses and trains, and decided to oppose the law, and to put its weight behind efforts to help voters get ID cards.

The committee has been monitoring elections since it was founded, and is not naive about what senior figures there calls "shenanigans", often involving cash, or "street money" that has been traditionally distributed by members of the Philadelphia political machine to local organisers, ostensibly to cover election expenses.

The committee's view is that such electoral shenanigans are much more likely to involve small, local races than presidential contests. They would traditionally involve street money, patronage and the machine "forgetting" to turn out voters whose views do not suit local powerbrokers. "There have been instances of reimbursements for people voting for one candidate," says Mr Lovelidge, a big cheese at PwC, the professional services firm. But he calls a specific law on voter IDs: "a solution in search of a problem".

State judges will issue a verdict on October 2nd, on the narrow but important question of whether Pennsylvania authorities can guarantee that every voter that needs a new card can and will be issued with one in time for the elections on November 6th. However, even if the court finds that the law risks disenfranchising voters and so cannot take effect now, the state is likely to appeal, say local Democrats, keeping everyone in uncertainty.

A final irony looms. Perhaps half of all those without identity cards were not likely to vote anyway, says Terry Madonna of Franklin and Marshall College, a pollster and political sage. Among the rest of the population, the idea that Republicans are trying to suppress black and low-income votes has energised the Democratic base like “rocket fuel”, to quote the chairman of the state Democrats, Jim Burn. In short, the voter-ID law could end up being a net positive for the Democrats.