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Historically this is both significant and frighting. The words and phrases used in a speech describing the Democratic party and Republican party in 1876 and the then upcoming Presidential election for Samuel J Tilden and Rutherford B Hayes is in may ways striking in similarity to 2008.

Remember the context as you read the entire article and expect the use of some offensive wordage.

Wow! What an amazing speech....should be required reading in all of our high-schools....and MCCain should take a page or 5 from his “play-book”

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

All persons desiring to vote the Democratic ticket are registered without personal application, and certificates are furnished them either before or on the day of election without even the formality of an oath as to eligibility. Registration the fountain-source of election, curtails Republican suffrage by the expense and inconvenience it entails upon persons not living at the county-seat, by refusal through willful neglect to register Republicans, and by fraud of the supervisor in making false entries; it adds to the Democratic vote through his fraud in unlawfully adding to the names on the registration-books those of all persons who are expected to vote the Democratic ticket.
If fortunate enough to obtain a certificate and he is in the low country or the Seventh Congressional District, which strikes nearly every republican centre, the Republican goes to the polls, if he can find them, early in the morning, as he is more or less acquainted with the delays there, especially if, there is a promise of a large Republican vote. The hour for the opening of the polls comes and goes, and neither managers nor boxes make their appearance. The crowd grows larger and soon there are four or five hundred Republicans. Anxious inquiries are made for the managers. It is learned later that, of the managers, Colonel Jones has gone to town, Mr. Brown has gone hunting, and Mr. Smith says he does not intend to serve, as there is no pay in it. Four or five hundred Republicans are disfranchised by the neglect of the managers, and not even the letter or spirit of the law is violated by the poll not being opened.
At a neighboring poll another scene is enacted. The polls are open, the boxes shown, the voters deposit their ballots, there is general levity, and everything appears to be fair. There are three hundred Republican voters; the Democracy have secured forty or fifty votes, and the polls close. The votes are counted; there are two or three hundred more ballots than names on the poll-list; instead of fifty Democratic ballots there are three hundred and fifty. The ballots are of regulation size, nobody has had access to the boxes but the managers, and the opening is too small for the introduction of any quantity of ballots without detection. Who put them in the box? The managers. The law for legalizing fraud is invoked. It requires the managers to draw ballots from the box until the number in the box tallies with the total number of votes cast. The box is shaken, for there is nothing for the Democracy to lose, being a case of “tail I win, head you lose”; ...
I desire to state in the most positive and emphatic manner that the number of negroes in South Carolina who have voted the Democratic ticket from compulsion of other causes from 1867 to the present time would not exceed five hundred. The entire white vote of the State (census of 1880) is only 86,900, while the total colored vote is 118,889, and yet at no election held in the State, except the election of 1876, when the gigantic steal was perpetrated by the Democrats, has the Democratic vote ever exceeded 70,000. At any election in South Carolina when the votes shall be counted as cast, it will be found that the negroes of the south are as true and as loyal to the principles of Republicanism as they were to the flag of this great country when treason sought to blot it out.

ELECTION METHODS IN THE SOUTH BY THE HON. ROBERT SMALLS, FORMERLY REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM SOUTH CAROLINA
http://facweb.furman.edu/~benson/docs/smalls.htm

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