as a requirement for voting is a consistent theme, according to historian Alexander Keyssar. At the Founding, only propertied white males could vote. As immigration, the end of slavery, and other trends brought in voters who were neither white males nor landed gentry, dozens of ingenious subterfuges were devised to roll back the franchise toward what it was at the Founding. So what Dubya and company did to invert enfranchisement of the poor by "Motor Voter" is not entirely new.
From
http://www.jessejacksonjr.org/query/creadpr.cgi?id=4396 :
"REFORM AND AN EVOLVING ELECTORATE By Alex Keyssar, published in The New York Times Sunday, August 5, 2001
... the very unpretty election of last November emerged from deep currents in American political life. Although we don't like to acknowledge it, there have always been strong antidemocratic forces in the United States. Large numbers of Americans, throughout our history, have not believed in universal suffrage and have acted accordingly. Their presence ... produced many episodes in which the right to vote contracted.
The most extreme and well-known examples involve African-Americans in the South who were deprived of their constitutionally protected right to vote for more than 70 years. But antidemocratic Southerners have had plenty of company, and not just in the early days of the republic when voting was limited to men of property. National women's suffrage was not finally adopted until 1920. Rhode Island imposed a property qualification on all foreign-born citizens for much of the 19th century; California went to great lengths to prevent Asians from voting; New York adopted an English language literacy test in 1921 that was still disfranchising hundreds of thousands of people in the 1960's. In the 1930's, an organization headed by George Wickersham, a former United States attorney general, actively sought to disfranchise unemployed workers who were receiving federal relief.
The resistance to democracy affected voting procedures as well as the right to vote itself; indeed, the erection of procedural obstacles to voting was often a strategic response to the formal enfranchisement of people considered undesirable. The registration systems that emerged in the late 19th century, for example, were ... efforts to keep immigrants and the poor from voting by interposing layers of paperwork and deadlines between potential voters and the ballot box.
The decline in turnout in American elections, which began at the end of the 19th century, was not an accident or the symptom of a mysterious malady. Both in the North and in the South, turnout was reduced, in good part, by laws designed to keep citizens from the polls and to prevent popular dissident parties from effectively contesting elections. Alabama's disfranchisement of men convicted of crimes like vagrancy and adultery - even after time had been served - was expressly crafted at the turn of the century to limit black participation in politics. (Similar laws limit black Alabaman voting today. Such permanent disfranchisement would be eliminated by the Carter-Ford recommendations.) In 1907, Pittsburgh's newly created voter registration board crowed about the "good results obtained" under a recently passed Pennsylvania registration law: in two years, the number of registrants was nearly halved...."
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