“You have an unprecedented turnout in a historic election,” said Adisa Muse, director of the Virginia ACLU’s rights-restoration project, “and you just don’t have enough resources.”

On Friday, the Advancement Project, a national voter-protection organization, announced it was moving forward, in conjunction with the Virginia NAACP, in its lawsuit against Gov. Tim Kaine and top state election officials for allegedly failing to provide enough voting machines and poll workers to meet the expected turnout in minority precincts in Richmond, Norfolk and Virginia Beach.The lawsuit seeks remedies like extending voting hours to 9 p.m. on Election Day and offering the option of paper ballots if voters have been waiting longer than 45 minutes. A federal judge in Richmond will hear arguments today.

Nancy Rodrigues, Virginia’s secretary of the board of elections,  told The Washington Independent that the lawsuit’s findings are out of date — and that state law doesn’t permit paper ballots or extended voting hours. That view is disputed in the lawsuit and by other election experts, citing the board’s authority to ensure that elections are properly administered.

The Kaine administration has found an unusual ally in defending against the lawsuit: the Republican Party. State GOP officials are seeking to intervene on the side of the governor, branding the request a “ploy” to get more Democrats to vote. “The other side is exploiting every single loophole that they have available to them,” Del. Jeffrey Frederick, the state GOP chairman, complained to The Washington Post.

Kaine has irked voting-reform advocates by saying that the state is “extremely well-prepared” to handle a big turnout and that long lines are not a major worry. “Look, we wait in line to buy coffee at Starbucks,” he said. “You wait in line to get on a roller coaster,”

“We shouldn’t treat the right to vote like a latte,” countered Judith Browne-Dias, co-director of the Advancement Project. She charges that there are racial disparities in the ratios of voters to machines that could lead to long lines and voters leaving before they cast ballots. In one largely black precinct in Richmond, Advancement Project researchers found a ratio of 452 registered voters per machine, “while across town [in a predominantly white neighborhood], it was 188 voters for each machine.”

Virginia law only requires that the decentralized election boards meet a minimum standard of 750 voters per machine.

With a half-million newly registered voters and an 85 percent turnout expected in some counties Tuesday, the Advancement Project estimated that such high turnouts would require some under-resourced precincts to take 20 hours to process all voters who show up.

There are other potential snares facing voters in Virginia. Peggy Sanner, Virginia coordinator for the non-partisan Election Protection coalition, worries that some voters will be “inappropriately challenged” over their eligibility, slowing down lines. Last week, for example, voting-rights groups protested that the registrar in Radford, Va., was illegally blocking eligible college students from voting because they listed their campus addresses as their home addresses.

In addition, many newly registered Virginia voters, including college students, don’t know that they’re required to bring some form of ID to the polls if they didn’t provide an ID when they registered. The result? They’ll be forced to use a provisional ballot, which are sometimes not included in final vote tallies. In Ohio in 2004, 22 percent of provisional ballots were not counted.

Even the long lines already evident during early voting haven’t fazed state officials. Asked about the possibility of delays on Election Day due to machine shortages, Rodrigues said, “All localities are following the law.”

Research assistance for this article was provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund.

The presentation was mostly a rehash of now-familiar talking points: minorities are targeted; Samuel J. Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber) would be purged if he were a new voter because his name is misspelled on Ohio voting rolls; and it’s more likely that someone will be struck by lightning than he will impersonate a voter on Election Day.

More noteworthy was the center’s proposed solution to voter suppression — universal voter registration.

Ideally, everyone should automatically become registered upon turning 18, said Brennan Center Deputy Director Wendy Weiser. Nevertheless, because there are more people in DMV registries than on voter rolls, “even using existing lists, we can do far better than we are currently doing.”

Voter suppression in elections past. (Brennan Center)

Representatives of the Brennan Center at the news conference largely skirted ACORN and the charges of voter fraud leveled against it.

After the presentation, I asked Michael Waldman, the director of the Brennan Center and a former head speechwriter for President Clinton, about the threat of voter suppression as a result of GOP challenges to ACORN’s registration lists.

“I think it’s a major excuse for voter suppression,” he responded. While there have been problems with ACORN’s registration efforts, he added that “the vast amount of good they’ve done ouweighs that.”

Waldman’s admonition to voters: “Don’t take no for an answer.” If you get turned away from the polls, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE and let the good guys rush to your defense.

That’s the model some activists are betting on.

Democrats have been moving swiftly to fight Republican voter suppression tactics in Michigan. Since first reported by our sister site, The Michigan Messenger, a GOP effort to suppress voters based on home foreclosures has drawn a lawsuit from the Obama campaign; calls for a Justice Dept. investigation, from Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and demands from grass-roots activists that Sen. John McCain condemn these practices.

(So far, McCain’s “honest and open election committee” did not even make a pretense of returning calls about the issue.)

Now bloggers and techies are developing a dedicated Voter Suppression Wiki — a centralized, open source online portal — to help track, expose and prevent voter suppression this cycle.

The wiki tracks incidents of voter suppression, and enables citizens to upload alleged examples of suppression. An “action center” links visitors to a range of local and national programs working to combat suppression. Jon Pincus, a social networking activist whom I met while working against warrantless spying, argues that Web activism is helpful here because most suppression turns on information gaps:

Almost all voter suppression relies to a large extent on information asymmetry. If voters know that they may have been purged from the database and it’s still before the registration deadline, they can check and if necessary re-register. If college students know that they actually won’t put their student loans at risk by registering, then they’ll ignore the misleading information from the county…. So simple as it sounds, broad awareness of potential voter suppression efforts and how to counter them, both during the registration period and in the final rush to voting, could make a huge difference

The wiki was just launched by Jack and Jill Politics, a site that bills itself as “a Black bourgeois perspective on U.S. politics,” and has already drawn attention from a range of bloggers, including writers at DailyKos, Huffington Post, Brad Blog, MyDD, Vivir Latino and Hullabaloo. While it’s critical that the press — particularly local and independent reporters — uncover these tactics, this wiki could help the cause by tapping the experience and activism of citizens around the country.