Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday entered the turbulent political waters of voting rights, signaling that the Justice Department would be aggressive in reviewing new voting laws that civil rights advocates say will dampen minority participation in next year’s elections.

...Mr. Holder also laid out a case for replacing the “antiquated” voter registration system by automatically registering all eligible voters; for barring state legislators from gerrymandering their own districts, and for creating a federal statute prohibiting the dissemination of fraudulent information to deceive people into not voting.

We now have a decade's worth of evidence that vote fraud, of the type that involves unregistered people voting or people voting multiple times, is so rare as to be inconsequential, while reports of voter suppression (almost all by Republicans) have over the same period been epidemic.

Holder and the Obama administration should run with this. It is, first of all, morally the right thing to do. Secondly, it's politically advantageous, given who is primarily being targeted by these local efforts. But it is also a winning argument. On the one side, you have Republicans engaging in self-serving behavior ostensibly to combat a problem that according to the experts does not exist. On the other side, you have a large group of Americans being denied a fundamental constitutional right.