By David Nather, CQ Staff

In an ordinary year, Democrats might have made short work of passing a bill prohibiting deceptive campaign practices intended to keep people — particularly minorities — from voting, such as mailing leaflets with the wrong election date. The bill was such as easy sell in the House that it passed by voice vote last summer.

But this is no ordinary year, and in the Senate, the bill’s main sponsor is Barack Obama of Illinois. Not only is he not around much now to help with the issue, but his sponsorship creates trouble beyond what could be expected for a piece of campaign legislation in a campaign year, especially one written by Democrats and aimed mainly at Republicans. The likely result is that the bill will go nowhere and the practices will continue.

SUSPECT TACTICS: Obama wants to ban ploys such as fake sample ballots. (GETTY IMAGES \ ALEX WONG)

The bill was supposed to provide a way to punish those responsible for the kind of incident that happened repeatedly in the 2004 and 2006 campaigns, when misleading fliers and other tactics were used to confuse minority voters. The examples cited by the bill’s supporters almost always focused on Republicans trying to hold the vote down in areas that lean Democratic.

In California, for example, a staff member of Tan Nguyen, the GOP challenger to Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez , sent fliers to 14,000 Orange County residents in the fall of 2006 claiming — falsely — that it was illegal for immigrants to vote. On Election Day of that year, fliers were distributed in Baltimore and Prince George’s County, Md., showcasing a “Democratic Sample Ballot” in which the boxes were checked for Republican Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., who was seeking a second term as governor, and Michael S. Steele, the GOP Senate nominee. (Both lost anyway.)

The issue of deceptive election tactics “is very significant because it’s a loophole, and it’s just not something that has been dealt with,” said Tanya Clay House, director of public policy for People for the American Way, a liberal group active in voting rights issues.

So last year, Obama joined with New York Democrat Charles E. Schumer — a vocal supporter of Obama’s presidential rival, the other Democratic senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton — to propose making deceptive election practices a felony, punishable with fines and prison terms, and to require the attorney general to refer cases to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for prosecution. Clinton herself is one of 20 cosponsors, all of them Democrats except for Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who has worked with Obama on a few bills in the past.

The Judiciary Committee approved a modified version of the bill last fall, and it has been sitting on the Senate calendar since. But bringing it to the floor now presents so many problems that even the advocacy groups supporting the bill aren’t holding their breath.

For one thing, Obama is campaigning almost full-time. He and Schumer testified for the bill at a Judiciary hearing last June, but it was Schumer, a member of the panel, who pushed the modified version through the committee in September. Even if Obama came back for a floor vote, Democrats see too much risk that Republicans would target his measure with politically embarrassing amendments.

It’s not just presidential politics that are likely to trip up the effort, though. “It’s always tougher to do any election reform measure during an election year,” because each major party is hypersensitive that it might give opponents an advantage, said Peter Zamora, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

In addition to such calculations, the Justice Department has raised objections to the bill, virtually eliminating any chance Senate leaders could slip it through by unanimous consent. Brian A. Benczkowski, the department’s top legislative affairs officer, warned in an October letter that the legislation “would give the federal government unprecedented legal authority to insert itself into the tactics of federal campaigns.” The measure, he contended, would allow the department to search campaign headquarters to determine whether someone provided an “explicit endorsement” of a candidate, a term he said was so vague it could have “a powerful, chilling effect on legitimate political speech.”

Officially, Obama’s aides say that the bill is still alive and that he is working to get it on the floor for a vote. But Zamora says his group is already looking ahead to the next Congress. By then, either Obama will be in the White House, eager to sign his own handiwork into law, or he’ll be back in the Senate with a lot more time to work on it.