The problem is that constituency drawing, voter registration and the voting process itself is largely controlled at local level by often partisan officials and the GOP know this is their own way to hold back the tide of demographic change. As these are Federal Level elections, you would have thought Congress itself could prescribe the rules by which elections are conducted, but I am unclear as to what extent this would be seen as interfering with "states rights". As in all things it would probably require a large Dem majority in Congress and on the SCOTUS to push any major reform through.

Index of Frank's Diaries

Not sure if this addresses the problem of voter suppression that you are speaking of, but a friend wrote to say that he had taken the last month off to help with the Obama campaign. His efforts had been in preparing and conducting training sessions for California lawyers planning to go up to Nevada to participate in voter protection, as well as recruiting folks to do it.

He said their recruiting efforts had been so successful that they had ended up with more people than they could use, and so diverted some of them to get out the vote canvassing, while his time had been spent rotating around sites doing front-line voter protection. He said it was mostly boring, but gratifying. The only down side he said, was that he only left Nevada long enough to get back to see Game 2 of the Giants at the park (like CH, he's a huge Giants fan).

It was his opinion that Obama was winning there, that the polls reflect that, and most of the Nevada-based campaign workers seem to agree.  The early voting figures also seem to indicate we're winning.

Its been deliberately made to be routine by a ongoing, forward looking effort by the conservative movement to make voting harder, starting in the 1970's.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.