The election of Barack Obama to the presidency increased the GOP pressure at the state level for this very effective tool of disfranchisement. Obama had managed to bring fifteen million new voters to the polls in 2008. They were overwhelmingly African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and poor. Moreover, 69 percent of these new participants in democracy voted for him and, as a result, put a black man in the White House.67 All that hope for change, though, dissipated in the midst of a recession that had begun under George W. Bush and which had already destroyed twenty-two trillion dollars of
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