Before I give the quote from this great Esquire article, let’s see who is talking:

John Weaver is a leading Republican strategist, having worked on a number of presidential campaigns and successful senate and gubernatorial efforts. He served as John McCain’s chief strategist for almost 11 years, and in this cycle worked for Jon Huntsman.

Now there are some solid Republican credentials. And what does Mr. Weaver have to say about the recent GOP efforts at voter fraud:

I’ve worked all over the country: in South Texas and the rural South, in Dade County and New York and Los Angeles and Chicago. While I’m totally supportive of legitimate ballot-security efforts, what is being sold to the GOP base, the media and the courts is complete bullshit. The days of widespread voter fraud, the kind that South Texas patrons and Mayor Daley used in 1960 to help the Kennedy/Johnson ticket, are long gone. Long gone. I’ve never seen widespread voter fraud, and certainly there is little evidence of it. The various GOP attorneys general should be ashamed to be part of this effort, especially as they’ve produced damn few true cases of fraud.

We should side on access to the ballot. Too many lives have been lost, too many troubled roads traveled, for us to walk back from a process that not only allows our citizens the right to vote, but easy access to it. Have we forgotten that bloody day on the Edmund Pettus Bridge?

I say we follow the money trail behind this national effort to suppress the vote. As soon as the election is over in November, the Justice Department should leave no stone unturned in pursuing this. The two worst programs that strike at the core of our Republic is the Citizens United decision and this program to subvert and suppress Americans from voting. And I have no doubt that funds hiding in the shadows of the Citizen’s United decision are being used in this program.

The thing to remember about the recent push in Wisconsin for voter ID is that it is part of a nationwide Republican effort to try to target certain people and make it harder for them to vote. If you’re interested in following this issue at a national level, I’d recommend checking out ThinkProgress, they have a good list of articles here.