Mother Jones ran a story yesterday that was meant to serve as a ‘field guide’ to vote-blocking tactics titled, “Beyond Diebold: Ten Ways to Steal This Election.” The piece outlined a number of different state and federal measures taken to exclude certain voting populations… and sociologist Chandler Davidson helped Mother Jones sort this out.

Tactics to deny Americans the right to vote are as old as, well, the right to vote. Democrats have been at fault in the past—take the literacy tests Southern states used to deprive blacks of their suffrage from the Civil War up through 1965. Today’s shenanigans—which still target minorities and vulnerable first-time voters—are more often designed to stifle Democratic turnout, perhaps never more than in 2008. “This is obviously an important election, and the turnout may break records,” says Rice University sociologist Chandler Davidson, who has studied vote suppression, “so there is every reason to expect these tactics will be employed.”

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