Stephan: The Republican Party's -- and yes this is Republican phenomenon -- concerted attempt to suppress the most fundamental right in a democracy, the right of citizens to vote, is one of the most shameful trends in the country. Every citizen should be outraged. If these suppression laws, essentially modern versions of Jim Crow poll taxes, stand I think there will be endlessly repeated images on television of voters being turned away, angry interviews of elderly grandmas denied their right to vote. As a consequence there will be a rise in cynicism. When your fundamental institutions are held in contempt, when individual citizens feel they are being cut out of the game, you are seeing the crumbling of democracy
Polls are the best way to find out who plans to vote and for whom they plan to vote. But polls are imperfect. They ask questions of a sampling of people - often about a thousand - and use those answers to draw conclusions about the public at large.
This year there is a new wrinkle, one that complicates the picture and could throw some of the polling off: the effects of newly enacted restrictive voting laws.
Take, for instance, the results of a New York Times/CBS News/Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday. ‘Likely voters
