The 2008 presidential election in the US may well leave us all waxing nostalgic for the good old disaster days of 2000 and 2004.

Given the asterisks in the record books next to both of those elections, you might think that Democrats, the victims of the anti-democratic (small "d") attacks in both elections, would have spent the intervening years putting virtually all resources into making sure there wouldn't be another such electoral disaster in 2008. You would have been horribly mistaken. In addition to proving miserable failures (though, admittedly, they didn't try very hard) at rolling back the tsunami of wholly unverifiable electronic voting systems now set for use, misuse and utter breakdown across the country this November, the Democrats have also made little headway in ending what will be one of the most troubling problems this year: voter disenfranchisement via phony Republican claims of "voter fraud". The Republicans, on the other hand, have been at work for years developing their anti-democratic (small "d" again, but it may as well be a capital "D") schemes. For a glimpse at what may well be the Rosetta Stone of Republican disenfranchisement efforts, one need look no further than at what Paul Weyrich, one of the founding fathers of modern American conservatism, told a gathering of some 15,000 preachers at a training conference in Dallas, Texas in 1980 (at which both Ronald Reagan and the right-wing Rev. Jerry Falwell also shared the podium).

"Many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome - good government. They want everybody to vote," Weyrich instructed the flock in comments captured on video.

"I don't want everybody to vote," he continued unapologetically. "Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now." And here comes the key to what will be the most crucial driving force for the entire Republican party effort this November: "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Thus spoke Weyrich in 1980, and the party leaders have followed in good faith ever since. Their disciples continue today to regularly advise the most powerful Republican insiders in the country. And thus have they gone forth to find every measure - no matter how adverse to the key American value of democracy, or how expensive the cost may be - to keep legitimate, legal voters from being able to cast their vote and have that vote counted accurately. Not every voter, of course. Just the ones who tend to vote Democratic (capital "D"). The easiest ones to target among those who don't tend to vote Republican: African-Americans, Hispanics, the elderly, the urban poor and even students. All in the hopes, as Weyrich urged, of keeping Republican "leverage in ... elections ... up" by keeping "the voting populace ... down". According to the non-partisan League of Women voters, some 21 million Americans do not have the type of photo identification required by the most draconian types of polling-place photo ID restrictions that are now being pushed - by hook and by crook - in states across the country. Among that group, some 25% of African-Americans, 18% of Americans over 65, 10% of the 40 million Americans with disabilities, 15% of low-income voters and untold numbers of voting-aged college students who reside in states other than where they may have valid drivers' licenses would have difficulty voting under such laws. (You may add to the Republican enemies list: married women, hurricane victims and those suffering from palsy, if you like.)

With that in mind, the Republicans have stopped at nothing, in order to see such laws passed wherever possible, and otherwise enforced nonetheless even where such poll restrictions have been found by the courts to be illegal and/or unconstitutional.

An unprecedented decision by the now rightward-slanted US supreme court earlier this year, allowed such a law to stand in Indiana. The result: the disenfranchised in the state's May primary election included college students and nuns in their 80s and 90s from St Mary's Convent (one of the "nonagenarian hooligans" kept from her right to vote, was 98 years old) and vets of multiple foreign wars, not to mention those who simply didn't bother to show up, since they knew they'd not be allowed to vote. All of that following the state of Indiana's own admission in the court case that they were unable to document a single case of voter fraud in the state's history that would have been prevented by their new voter-suppression law.

The supporters of such laws, however, argue that it's easy to get one of the free IDs that Indiana offers. Fact is, it's not easy at all, and those supposedly free IDs can get rather expensive. And the same effort is underway in other states as well.

In Missouri, for instance, a state regarded by the McClatchy News Service as "Ground Zero", in 2006, for the GOP's voter disenfranchisement effort, a man was arrested while legally voting two weeks ago during a state primary election. He was sent to jail because he offered two different pieces of perfectly legal ID, but none that the poll workers at his polling place wanted to accept. That, even after the state's supreme court found draconian photo ID restrictions to be unconstitutional there.

In the same state in 2006, not long after the state court's decision, the secretary of state herself (a Democrat), responsible for enforcing the election laws there, was told three times as she was trying to vote that she needed to present a photo ID. Of course she didn't, and has some familiarities with the law. But that didn't stop them from trying anyway, even as Missouri has some 200,000 voters who could, according to the secretary of state's own numbers, be kept from exercising their legal franchise under such laws.

Make no mistake. This is an effort that reaches to the highest federal levels. For example, despite a very clear federal law that requires it - the Bush administration's department of veterans affairs has disallowed voter registration activities in VA hospitals and other facilities, describing such activities as "partisan" (telling, that). Thus, it's assured that many of those who put their very lives on the line under the premise of spreading democracy throughout the world will have no voice in that same democracy back in their own country this year.

The beat goes on and will continue to grow louder through Election Day in November. Count on it. The Prospect's Art Levine elegantly and accurately referred to all of this as The Republican war on voting. But make no mistake about it, this is an all out Republican war on democracy in which we will be witnessing an unprecedented "troop surge" between here and November.

Paul Weyrich is surely smiling.