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Passing voter ID laws, restricting early voting, limiting voter registration drives and disenfranchising ex-felons: it’s the four-pronged GOP game plan we’ve seen play out in states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania in these months leading up to the election. The justifying logic may be contradictory, but the organizing principle is precise: those most likely to be harmed are people who were most likely to have voted for Obama in 2008. Nation writer Ari Berman went on Up with Chris Hayes yesterday morning to explain the recent history of convenient contradiction underlying the tactic. Republicans, it turns out, were “never against early voting until it was something Democrats were using,” Berman said. 

—Zoë Schlanger