Purging voter lists. Disregarding hanging chads. Ten-hour lines for voting. Non-verifiable electronic voting machines. Fake sample ballots. Harassing robo-calls. The Republican Party has gone to great lengths to depress the Democratic vote and generally use questionable tactics to win elections. But Senate Democrats, led by Democratic leader Harry Reid and number three ranking Democrat Chuck Schumer, are pushing for an end to the types of tricks that make it difficult to discern if elections accurately reflect the sentiments of those who puch ballots on election day. Tim Grieve and Michael Scherer have the story for Salon.

Remember those abusive Republican robo-calls and the sample ballots that suggested -- falsely -- that Michael Steele is a Democrat? The soon-to-be Senate majority leader does, and he's prepared to do something about them.

In a breakfast meeting sponsored by the American Prospect, Harry Reid told reporters today that the calls and the phony campaign literature were "absolutely wrong," and that one of the first 10 bills he introduces in the next Senate will deal with such abuses. "We need to make these criminal penalties," Reid said, saying that civil liability was apparently not enough to deter what happened in the run-up to last week's election.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, is pushing the Justice Department to explain what, exactly, it's going to do about last week's reports of voter intimidation and trickery. Schumer raised the issue today with Civil Rights Division chief Wan Kim, who was appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he has followed up with a letter to Alberto Gonzales and other department officials in which he describes some of the "egregious attempts to block access to the ballot during this year's campaign season." Among them: "In Maryland, groups of people were brought in buses from out of state and paid to distribute sample ballots that misleadingly suggested that Republican gubernatorial and Senate candidates were Democratic candidates. In Arizona, three men were observed intimidating Hispanic voters by stopping and questioning them outside a Tucson polling place. Virginia voters suffered through a campaign of phone calls, currently being investigated by the FBI, that wrongly informed voters that they were not registered and would face criminal charges if they appeared at their polling places."

With all of the big ticket items that the Democrats would like to have seen passed over the past dozen years, it's easy to overlook the becy of extremely popular policies that have been blocked or not even considered by the Republican Congress. Included in these is real electoral reform, the type being pushed by Sens. Reid and Schumer.

There is no question in my mind that the Democrats would score significant points by updating electoral law to ban repeated, annoying robo-calls, the type of which were used (perhaps successfully in some individual races) to piss of voters at Democratic candidates, thus pushing them not to vote at all. And such a move would be a win-win move for the Democrats because a banning of these unethical tactics, which most certainly make it more difficult for Democratic candidates to win in tight races.

But realistically, it's not clear to me that the Democrats need stop at these incremental steps. Bringing to the floor a comprehensive electoral reform package that ensures that voters are not disenfranchised by the actions of either political party or overly partisan election officials would do a lot to restore Americans' faith in American elections, which few could argue against. Perhaps Republicans and the President would be among that few. But their standing among the American people could amazingly dip even lower should they come out on record against creating a better election system.