Whether you are encouraged, discouraged or something in between about the coming presidential season, if you want to vote, look at these trends described below, see if you live in one of these states, and plan ahead: to register, to get the right ID and to know where you can vote. If you don’t, the Republicans may silence your vote and voice.

“Heading into 2012, we are seeing the largest assault on the right to vote since the post-Reconstruction Era,” said Denise Lieberman, senior attorney with Advancement Project, a national civil rights organization. “This is an unprecedented attack on voting that could affect more than 5 million voters in 2012; in states that represent nearly two-thirds of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Twenty new laws and executive orders in 14 states stand to turn back the clock and make it harder to vote. In 2011, two-thirds of the states introduced legislation that could impede voters and more is on the horizon for 2012.”

Tactic One: Toughen Voter ID Requirements

Before this year, most states allowed voters to use all kinds of identification, even utility bills, to get a ballot. Not anymore. Now a non-expired, state-issued photo ID is needed in eight states: Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. Looking at 2012, similar bills or ballot measures to toughen ID rules will surface in New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Jersey, Maine, Minnesota and Missouri, where legislation already has been filed.

Before 2011, only two states, Georgia and Indiana, prevented voters from casting ballots if they did not have a government-issued photo ID. In 16 mostly southern states with a history of Jim Crow laws, the Justice Department must “pre-clear,” or approve, any change to voting laws before they can take effect. The ID laws in Alabama, South Carolina and Texas have not yet been cleared. Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder gave a major voting rights speech opposing all voter suppression tactics. But the Justice Department has not yet made a determination about these and other new voting laws in “covered” states.

Here’s why this is such a devious strategy. The GOP knows most Americans have little sympathy for people who lack photo ID. Polls by Democrats show that. There is a class divide here, where minorities and lower-income people, including students, disproportionately lack state-issued photo IDs. College ID cards are not the same. The GOP also knows that recent presidential elections often come down to very close votes in a handful of states, and many people in those states will want to vote next fall but will discover they cannot.

The voting eligible population of Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, which all have new ID laws, is 29 million. Of that, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School has reported that 10.3 percent — or 3.2 million voters — lack a state photo ID. In those states, Lieberman said the number of voters without the requisite photo ID is larger than the margin of victory in the 2008 presidential or U.S. Senate (Texas) races. In other words, with one change in law, the GOP will require Democrats and Independents to do a better job turning out voters in 2012 than they did in 2008 when electing Obama.

Tactic Two: Create Hurdles To Get Required ID

It takes time, money, patience and determination to get the required photo IDs. In some states, state budget crises have led to shortening the work weeks at the state agency, notably motor vehicles, or even closing branch offices — such as in Wisconsin, Tennessee and Texas — where people need to go to get the ID. The ID itself may cost between $10 and $30, but there can be hidden costs if other forms of identification are needed to verify one’s identity and residency necessary to get a state ID. For example, not everybody has a birth certificate, marriage license, passport, divorce record or other documents, adding a complicating and time-consuming factor.

The requirements for secondary IDs, if available, can cost upward of $200 (for naturalization papers, not passports), and 17 states require a photo ID to get a copy of a birth certificate, which by itself can take weeks or months. Many elderly people born at home simply do not have these underlying papers, transportation or funds to get the required voting ID. These bureaucratic steps amount to a poll tax, a notorious tactic used to stop African Americans and poor whites from voting.

Tactic Three: Intimidate Voter Registration Groups

The Republican Party knows that the majority of people who register to vote in registration drives tend to be in minority and low-income communities, and are likely to vote for Democrats, if they vote at all. They also know that voter registration drives can be sloppily run, with errors on as many as one-third of all the applications tuned in, although local election administrators are well-versed in weeding out bad forms (although they resent the last-minute workloads).

As a result, seven states tried to add new restrictions on groups and their members doing voter registration drives in 2011, and these laws passed in Florida and Texas. The restrictions in these populous states must be pre-cleared by the Justice Department, which has yet to act. But the impact of these laws — which, in Florida, creates a more rigorous schedule to turn in applications and imposes stiff fines for errors — has already discouraged some groups, such as Florida’s League of Women Voters, from even getting started for 2012. In addition to Florida and Texas, Michigan is also considering legislation to more aggressively regulate the registration drives.

Tactic Four: Try To Eliminate Same-Day Registration

In recent years, states have tried to make the voting process easier — not harder. One of the most convenient ways to help people to vote is to allow them to register at the polls or county offices and then vote. In 2011, Republicans in Maine and Ohio eliminated same-day registration, although citizen-led organizing overturned the Maine law on Election Day this past November and put a ballot initiative on the November 2012 Ohio ballot, suspending a package of draconian election laws until that vote. Meanwhile, North Carolina’s legislature will consider a bill ending same-day registration next year.

Another hurdle concerns proof of citizenship. Arizona was the first state to require proof of citizenship to register to vote, but that law has been tied up in court. Meanwhile, bills requiring proof of citizenship passed in 2011 in Kansas, Alabama and Tennessee. Only Alabama’s law has to be cleared by the Justice Department, which has yet to act.

Tactic Five: Curtail Early Voting

In recent years, states have also tried to make voting easier for people by creating or expanding the option to vote before the first Tuesday in November. In 2011, five states — Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia — passed laws rolling back early voting options. Florida’s law reduces early voting from 13 days to seven days. That is potentially very damaging to minority communities, as nearly a third of all Floridians cast early ballots in 2008, with African Americans doing so at twice the rate of whites.

In Ohio, the law — which has been put on hold by a ballot initiative that will appear in November — would have eliminated voting on the Sunday before Election Day. In Georgia, the law reduced early voting from 45 days to 21 days; and in Tennessee from 15 days to 13 days. The changes in Florida, Georgia and Tennessee must be pre-cleared before they can be implemented. However, the Justice Department has yet to make its determination in those states.

Tactic Six: Ban Felons From Voting

Many people remember what the Florida Secretary of State did in 2000 with erroneous lists of convicted felons in her state: she intentionally purged tens of thousands of legal voters, which was one of many factors leading to George W. Bush’s victory in that year’s presidential battleground state. That tactic’s ghost has risen in Florida and Iowa, where governors have issued executive orders either delaying or revoking the rights of former felons to regain their right to vote. Across America, there are 5.3 million people, disproportionately people of color, who cannot vote because of felony convictions.

Tactic Seven: Bleed Election Administration Budgets

This may be the least-understood and most far-reaching barrier as people try to vote in 2012. Already, tight state budgets have given cover to political decisions in Tennessee, Wisconsin and Texas to limit the operating hours of, or close, the state offices where residents can obtain required photo IDs. As a result, waiting times in the offices that remain open have grown longer in Tennessee and Wisconsin. In Texas, there are 34 counties with no Department of Public Safety Offices, including four counties where the Hispanic population is more than 75 percent.

Limiting access to voter-related services before Election Days creates very troubling precedents for Election Day, when longtime polling places might be consolidated and moved with little public notice, or under-staffed by poll workers, who are volunteers — not professional election administrators. In other words, not only do would-be voters in many states have to get their credentials in order, it may take them much longer to vote because poll workers will have more work to do to process voters.

In Madison, Wisconsin, County Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl said the time it will take to process voters next November “has at least doubled.” In Florida, 30 percent of voters in 2008 voted early. If that state’s law stands cutting the period in half, that mean perhaps an additional 15 percent of the states’ voters will have to be processed on Election Day, doubling waiting times at peak hours. Meanwhile, as states have to spend millions to produce new voter identification documents, that will cut into promotional messages alerting voters about changes in the process.

And Where Is Obama’s Justice Department?

The biggest variable that may curtail or blunt these various voter suppression tactics is Justice Department taking any number of steps to reject laws limiting or complicating the right to vote in the 16 states covered by the federal Voting Rights Act — which are mostly in the Old South. Attorney General Eric Holder gave a major speech last week in Texas where he criticized the laws aimed at discouraging voters and suppressing votes.

However, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under Obama has not been very assertive in protecting voting rights. In its first two years, it filed fewer lawsuits than the administration of George W. Bush. While it has the power under the Voting Rights Act to reject many of the draconian laws passed by some of the biggest states — notably Texas and Florida — it has yet to do so and the 2012 political season is about to begin.

“The Justice Department plays a very important role,” said Advancement Project’s Lieberman. “Not only are they required to clear new voting laws in states that are subject to this pre-clearance requirement, generally 16 states in the South, but they also have the ability to bring affirmative lawsuits in any state under Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits laws that have a discriminatory impact on voting. They can also intervene in other lawsuits alleging constitutional violations.”

The attorney general’s speech last week decried many of the new hurdles to voting. But civil rights lawyers want action — not words — and are nervous about the Department’s reticence to act. Last week, the Advancement Project delivered 120,000 petitions to Attorney General Holder urging the DOJ to do just that: enforce these federal voting laws.

In the meantime, the very people targeted by Republicans — racial minorities, young voters, the working poor, the elderly and people with disabilities — should not take any chances. They should get their identity papers in order, be sure to register before state deadlines, and look for online tools to find polling places. In other words, they need to know and assert their voting rights, because the system may not help them in 2012.

It is awarding the presidency to the candidate who wins the most votes.

“The United States is not a democracy and shouldn’t be,” said Michael Munger, Duke University’s Political Science Department chairman and a 2008 Libertarian gubernatorial candidate attacking it at a League of Women Voters forum. “There is NO moral force in the majority. It is just what most people happen to think.”

These right-wingers are truly worried that a plan reforming the way the president-electing Electoral College works is gaining legal ground and could bring the biggest change in the political landscape in decades. The National Popular Vote plan would replace the current system, in which states award Electoral College delegates to whomever wins the presidential vote in that state, with a new interstate agreement where a participating state’s delegates would be bound to the national popular vote winner.

In other words, as soon as states with a total of 270 Electoral College delegates sign on—and they are halfway there—presidential elections where one state swayed the outcome, such as Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000, would be no more.

“It is born from a frustration of a system that is inherently broken, a system that allots two-thirds to three-fourths of resources in a presidential campaign in the last six or seven weeks to six states. That isn’t democracy,” said Pam Wilmot, Common Cause’s National Popular Vote coordinator. “We cannot and should not have a small number of states deciding the outcome of presidential elections for the rest of us.”

The idea that voters across the country—not just in politically split battleground states—would elect the president scares the Republican Party and arch conservatives on so many levels. It would upend the way candidates and political parties and consultants now work to retain their power and influence. It would force presidential nominees and parties to campaign in more racially diverse states, more cities and suburbs, addressing those communities and their concerns.

“We need to kill it in the cradle before it grows up,” McConnell told a Heritage Foundation audience last December.

Right-wingers say these changes are terrible, and not just because they might empower Democrats and relegate the GOP as it now exists to history’s dustbin. But even worse, they say this is a constitutional coup because the founders’ great insight was that some branches of the government—such as the presidency and Senate—had to be set apart from the passions of majority opinion and the tyranny of mob rule.

“It is a completely faulty intellectual argument,” said NPV founder, Stanford University’s John Koza. “It is oblivious to the fact that the mob rules now. In the first presidential election, only five states let people vote for president. And many of the founders, like Alexander Hamilton in New York, were very happy that the people did not vote for president. But it was left up to the states if people voted for president, and now 100 percent of the states let people vote for president.”

“So if you are against mob rule, you are against what we have now,” he continued. “The mob is Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, which dominate presidential elections. The question is whether there is some virtue in having the mob in 35 states ignored in preference to the mobs in 15 states. It is a completely silly argument.”

National popular vote’s right-wing detractors are first drawn to the partisan implications, suggesting that this is a potential blue-state bonanza born out of revenge for Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in Florida in 2000. Then they are quick to point out that widely held contemporary notions of what our democracy consists of are wrong—and are not what the founding fathers envisioned at all.

“Democrats love this idea,” said Michael Uhlmann, professor of politics and policy at Claremont Graduate School and frequent Heritage Foundation speaker, in a recent debate with Koza. “Any Republican and conservative who signs onto it needs a psychiatric examination. These people aren’t foolish. There are real constraints imposed by the Electoral College system.”

Right-wingers like Uhlmann say that because human nature cannot be trusted, the founders created key governing bodies that were not elected, but instead consisted of wiser “elders” whose decisions put brakes on more impulsive majorities. The U.S. Senate was one such body and until the 17th Amendment passed in 1913, senators were appointed, not elected. The Electoral College, where 48 states (Nebraska and Maine are exceptions) award all their delegates to the state’s presidential victor, is another, because it spreads the real constitutional act of electing the president to special legislators who meet once every four years.

“The criticisms of the institutions of the Electoral College, based on an assumption that there is a mystical ‘will of the people’ that can be divined through elections, are misguided,” said Munger. “There is no better system for controlling political excesses, and forcing presidential candidates to represent the entire nation, that that created out of the original wisdom and compromises of the early 19th century.”

But according to Koza, who launched the National Popular Vote movement, there is a far better system: engaging the majority of American voters in choosing the president.

A national popular presidential vote is the natural next step in the country’s constitutional evolution that has expanded voting rights to all citizens in every state; not just to males, millionaires, landowners and slaveholders, as was the case when the nation was founded, Koza said. NPV elevates voters in every state, not just in tightly divided battleground states. Moreover, the conservatives’ obsession about insulating the presidency from mob rule does not hold up to reality, he said.

But it is perhaps the best argument the hard right has—because everything else they have thrown at NPV and are likely to throw at it as it comes closer to becoming a political reality—eight states plus the District of Columbia have signed on—is unlikely to prevail in federal court. Even noisy critics, like the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, admit NPV “is not unconstitutional.” He just hopes it is “unenforceable.”

“Our bill is an interstate compact,”  Koza said. “A state cannot get out of an interstate compact except on the terms of the compact itself. There’s 200 years where no court has ever allowed any state to weasel out of an interstate compact. It’s higher than the state Constitution. When a state enters into an interstate compact, it’s more binding than the state Constitution is.”

NVP: The Fine Print

The idea of a national popular vote to elect the president is not new. What is new is using the legal vehicle of an interstate compact, not a constitutional amendment, to get there.

The current national popular vote movement emerged out of a growing frustration with recent presidential campaigns. What happened in 2000 in Florida, when Al Gore won more popular votes nationally than George W. Bush but the Supreme Court intervened and awarded the presidency to Bush, was a turning point. But there have been other long-simmering frustrations with the way presidential elections unfold, most notably how most of the country is left watching the action in a few other states.

“You just can’t have an election coming down to 500 people or 20,000 people in an entire nation. It’s just crazy,” said Common Cause’s Wilmot. “The reason that it has such appeal is a basic sense that is consistently held in every demographic—Republican, Democratic, old, young, black, white—that the person with the most votes should win, and that every person’s vote in the election should count the same. And neither of those are true in our current system. And they feel it is wrong. And it is wrong.”

Wilmot is correct about NPV’s support. Majorities of American overwhelmingly back replacing the current Electoral College system with popular vote election of the president, according to Gallup, whose polls have tracked the issue for years. And it is not just Democrats who support this, although 71 percent of Democrats said they did, compared to 61 percent of Independents and 53 percent of Republicans polled last fall. But the Republicans who support NPV are cut from a different political cloth than the RNC leadership or conservative think tanks.

“I believe this is a center-right country and that our conservative ideas and ideals will win the day if we take the argument to all the people, not just those in battleground states,” wrote Laura Brod, a Republican member of Minnesota’s House since 2002. “There is a conservative story in favor of a national popular vote to be told.”

The U.S. Constitution grants state legislatures complete power over selecting Electoral College delegates. So the National Popular Vote movement has been working in 42 states to push for identical legislation to join an interstate compact binding their delegates to a presidential popular vote winner once enough states representing 270 delegates sign on—the Constitution’s requirement to elect a president.

Since 2007, eight states—Maryland, Illinois, Washington, New Jersey, California, Vermont, Hawaii, Massachusetts—and the District of Columbia have passed identical legislation, representing 132 delegates. The Republican critics like to note these are all blue states. Koza, in contrast, calls them “spectator states” that are tired of sitting on the national political sidelines.

“Every state that has enacted this is a spectator state,” he said. “And it is a much more difficult sell in the battleground states because the desires of the people who run the legislatures appreciate the current system, even though the voters of those states don’t support the current system. Look at the polls.”

The NPV compact does not replace the Electoral College; it modifies how states instruct their presidential electors to proceed, which is exactly what the Constitution tells states to do in Article Two. Massachusetts, for example, has done that nearly a dozen times in the past 200 years. It does not tell states or parties that they cannot hold the primaries and caucuses as they are now doing, starting in Iowa and New Hampshire. But after parties nominate their candidates, their picks would need to campaign in far more states and regions than is now the case. In effect, presidential elections would become national contests where candidates would have to speak to a broader range of voters.

“You’ll have to turn out your base,” said Wilmot. “There will be a get-out-the-vote effort everywhere, because you need to turn out your voters and every single one that you turn out is going to add to your total nationwide. And every one that is left at home is one you have to replace somewhere else, or else the other side will beat you in the ground game.”

A handful of states may pass the compact in 2012, Koza said, but presidential election years typically see shorter legislative sessions. Connecticut is a priority for Common Cause, Wilmot said. Other states are holding hearings, like Kansas and Alaska recently did. And there are ongoing efforts in states like New York, where it passed one legislative chamber but was not adopted by the other.

Here Come the Lawyers

The NPV compact’s authors know the law will be challenged in federal court once states representing 270 Electoral College votes sign on. They are confident that the compact is constitutional, which even some right-wing critics concede. Opponents have begun to claim it is unenforceable, saying that the chief election officer in a compact state cannot order a political party’s slate of presidential electors to vote for a candidate who did not win in their state. But Koza and other NPV backers say, yes they can, because state legislatures have absolute authority under the U.S. Constitution to do that.

That scenario, which one critic in Connecticut said “would substitute the will of outsiders for the determination of Connecticut citizens,” is a non-issue, Wilmot said, because Article Two gives states “plenary,” the legal term for complete, power to establish rules over their state’s presidential electors.

“The election [of the next president] is in December [when the Electoral College meets], but for all intents and purposes for the American public, it’s on Election Day in November and the winner is declared at that time,” she said. The December meeting essentially becomes a “ceremonial, rubber stamp.”

Legal challenges would not delay the seating of the next president, she said, because the U.S. Constitution sets a timetable. That is different from Minnesota’s 2009 recount in its U.S. Senate race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman, which took months, because the U.S. Constitution does not have a timetable for seating U.S. senators.

Still, there will be no shortage of fear-based criticisms aimed at NPV as it edges closer to having states sign on with the needed 270 Electoral College delegates, but most of those have been rebutted in Koza’s book (available as a free download at the NPV Web site). That chapter, responding in great detail to “myths” about NPV, is 248 pages long.

One big misconception is the 12 largest states would become presidential deciders, Koza said. “That’s based on the misconception that the 12 largest states are controlled by the same party, but they’re not,” he said. Another misconception is the big cities will edge out small states in the presidential election process. “That’s factually wrong. A small state, Iowa or New Hampshire, is playing a big role in the nomination process,” Koza said, noting that NPV only affects the November election results. “Small states don’t become the presidential battlegrounds. They are just as ignored as the Californias.”

NPV would change the way money is spent in campaigns. No matter what vote counting system is in place, presidential campaigns always seek to raise as much money as they can—and then are forced to spend it wisely. NPV’s impact would be on the spending side, as the campaigns create and budget for messaging in different regions and media markets.

“Currently, TV is the biggest way money is spent. Remember TV markets are not just limited to cities,”  Koza said. “They would campaign the way they do now. They would have personal messages and buy TV and radio and bumperstickers and print leaflets and do precinct walking—all of which can be delivered to any point in any state.”

And what of the right-wing critics who will continue to assert that America is not a democracy but a constitutional republic where the majority of voters should not get to vote for president—and for good reason, because of the tyranny of mob rule?

“Open a dictionary,” Koza replied. “Whether you are a democracy or not has nothing to do with whether you have a winner-take-all [Electoral College] rule. The president will still serve for four years. The federal legislature will still serve for two or six years, and they will make decisions on behalf of the public between elections. That’s the definition of a republic. These people who babble about democracy versus republic have never looked in the dictionary.”