Ahead of the 2012 US presidential election, a wave of new state laws makes voting harder, and Fault Lines examines who wrote them and who they hit. Republican-controlled legislatures have passed voter ID requirements, cuts to early voting, and other restrictions that advocacy groups say could disenfranchise as many as five million voters, most of them in minority communities. The film travels to Tennessee and Florida, two states with some of the strictest new rules, talking to the people who may be turned away from the polls and the organizers scrambling to register and inform them before Election Day. It also tracks the Justice Department's decision to block similar laws in South Carolina and Texas on the grounds that they discriminate against minority voters, and sets the current fight against the memory of the 1960s civil rights battles that first secured that access. Politicians defending the laws cite voter fraud prevention; the communities affected describe something closer to a rollback. The film lays out both arguments and the numbers each side is counting on.