The New York Times reports that Attorney General Eric Holder will speak out tonight against the proliferation of state-level measures intended to make it more difficult for certain groups of people to vote:

Mr. Holder is to speak Tuesday evening here at the presidential library of Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The act enables the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to object to election laws and practices on the grounds that they would disproportionately deter minority groups from voting, and to go to court to block states from implementing them.

A draft of Mr. Holder’s speech urges Americans to “call on our political parties to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success and, instead, achieve success by appealing to more voters.”

People For the American Way Foundation examined the growing trend of unnecessary and burdensome Voter ID laws and other efforts to suppress the vote in a report earlier this year, concluding:

Decades after the Civil Rights Movement, there are now extraordinary attempts to reverse the trend towards equality and throw roadblocks in the way of voters. Voter suppression through new laws that make it more difficult to register to vote and cast a ballot and aggressive tactics to intimidate voters at the polls are undermining the country’s democratic foundations, all in the name of an imaginary, invented crisis.

If the current trend continues, potential voters in 2012 will face greater challenges than ever, with the enactment of burdensome and unnecessary new laws and right-wing groups mobilizing to target polling places in specific communities.

The proliferation of laws making it harder to register and to vote presents a real threat to our democracy. The attorney general is right to call them out for what they are.