Voting rights tragedy

Apparently the state of North Carolina is vying with Mississippi and Texas for most regressive and backward in the country.  Think Progress:

Just days after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, North Carolina is moving forward with a host of bills to roll back voting rights. Republican lawmakers are accelerating a new agenda to eliminate early voting, Sunday voting hours, and same-day registration provisions. GOP leaders also vowed to move quickly to pass a controversial voter ID law that would make it much harder for minorities, seniors, students, and low-income voters to cast their ballots.

Yes, because nothing says "Democracy" quite as much as telling Americans they can't vote.  It's no coincidence that this accompanies new intransigence on the right.  Rather than admitting that changing demographics behoove them to enlarge their outreach, they've now decided that the REAL problem is that there are hard-right White Christians for whom the Republicans are not yet conservative enough.

So, according to this idea, not only do Republicans not want blacks or young people voting, they sure as heck don't want the Hispanics getting immigration reform and voting.

No, the problem isn't the minorities:  they aren't wanted (and have to be repressed) so that disaffected whites come home.

They call them the Missing White Voters.  

The new argument sees immigration reform at best as a divisive distraction from the GOP’s real problem of countering “white flight” from the polls. At worst, they view it as an electoral apocalypse, a seventh seal behind which lies an unbroken line of future Democratic presidents....

You can hear the “missing whites” thesis everywhere once you start looking for it. Hannity cited York’s piece in his column opposing the “Gang of Eight” bill. Social conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly recently told a radio host that “the people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes, the white voters who didn’t vote in the last election and there are millions of them.”
....
[But] even if Republicans boost white turnout, a bunch of the gains will go to running up the score in Southern states they already win or to improving their margin in Northern states they don’t contest. 

This is the “demographic death spiral” Sen. Graham is so worried about. And pro-reform Republicans are growing panicked as the new revisionism on Mitt Romney’s loss takes hold. Karl Rove, whose Crossroads group is spending millions promoting immigration reform, confronted his critics head on in the Wall Street Journal last month in an op-ed titled “More White Votes Won’t Save The GOP.” Graham and fellow immigration co-sponsor John McCain aren’t just warning of a 2016 loss anymore, they’ve taken to publicly guaranteeing one if their immigration bill fails. 

“[If] we don’t pass immigration reform, if we don’t get it off the table in a reasonable, practical way,” Graham said on Meet The Press last month, “it doesn’t matter who you run in 2016.”

Hence, it becomes ever more important to keep the other guy's supporters from voting.