What voter ID laws are useful for is reducing voter participation by you know who. Requiring an unexpired government-issued ID, a bank statement, or a utility bill is good. Requiring an unexpired government-issued photo ID, such as a driver’s license or a passport, is better, because about 25 percent of African Americans and 16 percent of Latinos don’t have any––as against 11 percent of the general population. The nine states with the strictest photo ID requirements are mostly rural, which means the government offices where such ID can be obtained are likelier to be far away and to keep irregular hours. The Woodville, Mississippi office is open only on the second Thursday of every month. Wisconsin’s Sauk City office is open only on the fifth Wednesday of every month, and since eight months in 2012 don’t even have a fifth Wednesday, the office will open its doors only four days this year.

Voter registration. Before you vote, you have to register. Five states now require proof of citizenship with an unexpired passport (something fewer than one-third of Americans possess) or a birth certificate or a naturalization certificate (to which about 7 percent lack easy access). Since acquiring these documents can easily cost as much as $100, this requirement has the virtue of weeding out both legal immigrants and the native-born poor. The ostensible target is undocumented immigrants, but they have even less incentive to commit voter fraud than American citizens do: In addition to steep fines and imprisonment, they’d risk deportation.

Another tactic, favored in Texas and Florida, is to target nonprofit groups that conduct voter-registration drives (the League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). This is achieved by imposing onerous new training, registration, and/or liability burdens on the groups’ volunteers. The proportion of African American and Latino voters who register through third-party drives is about twice what it is for whites.

Closing the polls. Since lower-income voters more often work early in the morning or late at night, Republicans tend to favor shorter polling hours. They justify this with feigned concern about the stamina of (often elderly) volunteers. A similarly motivated opposition has mobilized against early voting arrangements that let people vote on weekends. Sunday voting is a particular target. The stated reason is that it’s impious. (Glenn Beck: “This is an affront to God.”) The actual reason is that Sunday voting allows black churches to provide “souls to polls” transport after services. Ohio and Florida have eliminated it.

Purging. States have to update their voter lists, right? Federal law requires certain safeguards, such as notifying those found ineligible so they can dispute erroneous removals. But many such formalities go unobserved, especially if you purge close enough to Election Day. (In this, as in many other subcategories, the gold medal goes to Republican Florida Governor Rick Scott, who has been doing battle with the Justice Department over the legality of his planned purge of noncitizens.) A variation on purging is caging, wherein nonforwardable letters are sent to voters in African American neighborhoods. Whichever letters get returned unopened occasion instant purges. The Republican National Committee got caught doing this in the 1980s, and now the party is not allowed to under a consent decree. But considerable evidence suggests the GOP has quietly resumed the practice anyway.