Over the last few months, Republican governors and state legislatures have been busily implementing laws ostensibly designed to prevent voter fraud. It has been a project largely directed by the rightist American Legislative Exchange Council and financed by the Koch brothers

See The GOP War On Voting for more.

For the sake of clarity it should be noted that “voter fraud,” as defined by Republicans, occurs when any votes are cast by minorities, students, senior citizens, or Democrats.

Now in Florida, the first casualty of this discriminatory and unconstitutional policy has been targeted and become subject to severe penalties. The fiendish scofflaw is, Jill Cicciarelli, a teacher in a New Smyrna Beach high school:

“The teacher who heads up New Smyrna Beach High School’s student government association could face thousands of dollars in fines. Her transgression? Helping students register to vote.”

This is the completely predictable result of the abuse of power exercised by Governor Rick Scott and the GOP in Florida. It is inconceivable that anyone could defend fining a high school civics teacher for doing her job: teaching students how to participate in the democratic process. Instead, her students are learning more about the sort of tyrannical regimes that the GOP is modeling itself after.

When the law was first enacted, the League of Women Voters was forced to suspend voter registration efforts in Florida due to the risk the law placed on their volunteers and administrators. Republicans are fully aware of what they are doing. They know that third-party voter registration organizations have been successful in expanding access to the polls to the very same disenfranchised citizens that the GOP wants to suppress. GOP strategists also know that the incidence of voter fraud in America is statistically null. So if there isn’t any fraud to combat, and the citizens who are hurt are likely to vote Democratic, the only conclusion is that Republicans are exploiting their power to deny Americans they don’t like their Constitutional right to vote.

This gross inequity is not limited to Florida. It is an attack on democracy that is spreading across the country by Republicans and their lobbyists.

The GOP has commenced the process of criminalizing voting. They are constructing obstacles far greater than those of the Jim Crow era. Historically repulsive methods of voter suppression effectively kept many citizens from voting, but these new methods could cost honest citizens thousands of dollars and threaten them with incarceration. It’s downright un-American. For more on this disturbing trend watch Rachel Maddow’s expose from last July: