This story doesn't seem to have gotten the attention in the blogosphere that it deserves. The non-Beltway McClatchy reports:

The ways in which the department's Civil Rights Division has enforced the 2002 Help America Vote Act and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act go to the heart of allegations that the Bush administration has used the unit to suppress the votes of poor minorities.

First, the voting machines:

The Help America Vote Act [as Orwellian a name as "Healthy Forests"] required states to upgrade voting machines and to create central, computerized databases of registered voters by Jan. 1, 2006.

he department accused New York state of failing to upgrade its voting systems and to create a centralized voting list by the deadline and sued Indiana for failing to screen out ineligible voters.

Former Justice Department officials noted that other states - such as Texas, Colorado and Utah - had similar or worse voter-registration problems, but the department didn't sue their Republican election officials.

Gosh, gosh, you'd think the Justice Department wants only Democratic voters to use electronic voting machines. I wonder why that would be?

Second, purging voter rolls:

"Aggressive purging of the voter rolls tends to have a disproportionate impact on voters who move frequently, live in cities and have names that are more likely to be incorrectly entered into databases," said [Joseph Rich, a former chief of the Justice Department's Voting Rights Section], who's now an attorney with the liberal-leaning Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights. Primarily, he said, this means poor, minority voters.

In late 2005, the department sued Missouri's Democratic secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, charging that her state had failed to eliminate ineligible voters from registration rolls. A federal judge threw out the suit this spring, noting that the registration lists were controlled by county registrars over whom Carnahan had little authority and the Justice Department had presented no evidence of fraud.

The suits accused Alabama Secretary of State Nancy Worley and Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, both Democrats, of failing to meet the deadline for setting up statewide databases of registered voters, which they blamed on technical complications.

In Worley's case, the department took the extraordinary step of persuading a federal judge nominated by President Bush to relieve her of her authority to oversee the 2006 election and to give Republican Gov. Bob Riley that authority as a "special master" of the court.

Worley called the suit "incredibly political," noting that it was filed shortly before she was due to face Democratic primary voters in a re-election bid and blaming it for her defeat.

Dunlap said the company that was hired to create the database in Maine ran into technical problems and couldn't complete the job. Nevada, he said, used the same vendor and also experienced problems, but the Justice Department didn't sue its Republican secretary of state, Dean Heller, who was running for Congress at the time.

These examples should make it obvious to a six-year-old child--and, possibly, the Beltway Democrats--that the Republicans have hijacked the criminal Justice system to affect election outcomes.

You'd almost think the Republicans can't win without cheating...