Supressed Voter Turn out Gives Republicans the Best Chance of Winning

R. Neal shows himself the realist about tactical election politics, especially the dirty tricks that serve a certain red-state party:

there is clear and very real evidence of an organized effort to undermine election reforms in Tennessee. Go read that and tell me how you interpret it as anything short of an effort to discourage voter registration, suppress voter turnout, inject big money into elections, make it impossible to verify election results, and install hand picked election officials to oversee their schemes.

The only thing that isn't clear is the motive. It may be as simple as "because they can." More likely, it's to gain every possible legal advantage going in to the 2010 elections.

And they media? Well, they're not helping the situation some deep investigative journalism, let alone attention, so what good are they?

Mainstream media is taking a pass on the controversy. They are too busy mourning the death of journalism to go do some journalism as part of their "fourth estate" duties, one of which is to watch over this most fundamental element of representative democracy. Other than a couple of bloggers and a "colorful" activist (who got a visit from the TBI courtesy of the Secretary of State's office for his trouble), nobody seems to care.