The Democratic National Committee has supported lawsuits in some states, and officials say the party is intensifying its efforts to combat the new laws. The party's national chairman, Howard Dean, last month announced a drive to recruit 7,500 pro bono lawyers and law students to assist in an "election protection program."
In court so far, challenges to the voter identification laws have met with mixed results. Judges have halted two versions of the Georgia law, but a law has been upheld in Indiana.
Challenges are pending elsewhere.
"With voter ID and registration, this is where the current battles over election practices are now being fought," said Dan Tokaji, an Ohio State University law professor who publishes the election-law blog Equal Vote.
Late last month, Hearne, the lawyer for the conservative American Center for Voting Rights, scrambled to prepare after a Missouri judge scheduled hearings on that state's voter identification law.
He lined up a disabled voter who backs the ID law, a supportive state legislator, and a study by two University of Missouri professors with which he intends to counter his opponents' claims that the law would disenfranchise more than 170,000 voters.
The study, for which Hearne said he paid the professors a "minimal amount," concludes that fewer than 20,000 registered voters lack a photo ID, and of those, about 6,000 would probably turn out to vote.
Hearne said he was inspired to delve into the details of election law after 2000, when on election day he found himself in court arguing against a move by Democrats to delay the closing of some St. Louis polling sites.
"They were arguing for a plaintiff who wound up to be dead. It was a fiction," he said. "I thought I had walked into a John Grisham novel."
Weeks later, Hearne joined GOP lawyers in Broward County, Fla., examining dimpled chads and other disputed ballots in the presidential contest.
Hearne said he did not coordinate with the Republican Party, and he vigorously denied that his goal was to suppress Democratic votes.
A spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Danny Diaz, said the party was closely monitoring the cases across the country but was not directly involved in coordinating strategy.
Still, the party has advised at least one state on election law. In a March e-mail obtained by The Times, the Republican National Committee's deputy counsel advised an Arizona official that the state was free to require proof of U.S. citizenship for newly registered voters, as the new state law mandates.
