“With studies suggesting that long lines at the polls cost Democrats hundreds of thousands of votes in November, party leaders are beginning a push to make voting and voter registration easier, setting up a likely new conflict with Republicans over a deeply polarizing issue,” the New York Times reports.

“White House officials have told Congressional leaders that the president plans to press for action on Capitol Hill, and Democrats say they expect him to highlight the issue in his State of the Union address next week. Democrats in the House and Senate have already introduced bills that would require states to provide online voter registration and allow at least 15 days of early voting, among other things.”

American Prospect: “Unlike citizens in every other advanced democracy–and many other developing ones–Americans don’t have a right to vote. Popular perception notwithstanding, the Constitution provides no explicit guarantee of voting rights. Instead, it outlines a few broad parameters.”

Facing a highly critical group of black legislators, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) distanced himself from a controversial election law that led to fewer early-voting days and long lines, the Tampa Bay Times reports.

Said Scott: “It was not my bill. We’ve got to make changes, I agree… The Legislature passed it. I didn’t have anything to do with passing it.”

Scott signed the bill into law in 2011.

Jeffrey Toobin writes that “after the 2010 midterm elections, nineteen states passed laws that put up barriers to voting, including new photo-I.D. and proof-of-citizenship requirements, and restrictions on early and absentee voting. In most of those states, Republicans controlled the governorship and the legislature. The purported justification for the changes was to limit in-person voter fraud, but that claim was fraudulent itself, since voter fraud is essentially nonexistent.”

“It is against this backdrop that, next month, the Supreme Court will take up a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most effective law of its kind in the history of the United States. A century after the Civil War, the act, in abolishing many forms of discrimination employed by the Southern states, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, finally turned the legal right for African-Americans in those states to vote into an actual right to vote. Bipartisan congressional majorities have reauthorized the law four times, most recently in 2006. (It passed the House overwhelmingly and the Senate unanimously, and was signed into law by George W. Bush.) The question now is whether the Supreme Court will strike down the Voting Rights Act as a violation of states’ rights.”

An Ohio State University researcher has found that “as many as 49,000 people across Central Florida were discouraged from voting because of long lines on Election Day,” the Orlando Sentinel reports.

“About 30,000 of those discouraged voters — most of them in Orange and Osceola counties — likely would have backed Democratic President Obama … About 19,000 voters would have likely backed Republican Mitt Romney … This suggests that Obama’s margin over Romney in Florida could have been roughly 11,000 votes higher than it was, based just on Central Florida results. Obama carried the state by 74,309 votes out of more than 8.4 million cast.”

“Republicans alarmed at the apparent challenges they face in winning the White House are preparing an all-out assault on the Electoral College system in critical states, an initiative that would significantly ease the party’s path to the Oval Office,” National Journal reports.

“Senior Republicans say they will try to leverage their party’s majorities in Democratic-leaning states in an effort to end the winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes. Instead, bills that will be introduced in several Democratic states would award electoral votes on a proportional basis.”

“Already, two states — Maine and Nebraska — award an electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district… But if more reliably blue states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were to award their electoral votes proportionally, Republicans would be able to eat into what has become a deep Democratic advantage.”

“A lot of us are campaign officials — or campaign professionals — and we want to do everything we can to help our side. Sometimes we think that’s voter ID, sometimes we think that’s longer lines — whatever it may be.”

— GOP campaign consultant Scott Tranter, quoted by the Huffington Post.

Former Florida Republican party officials tell the Palm Beach Post that a new election law that “contributed to long voter lines and caused some to abandon voting altogether was intentionally designed by Florida GOP staff and consultants to inhibit Democratic voters.”

“Republican leaders said in proposing the law that it was meant to
save money and fight voter fraud. But a former GOP chairman and former
Gov. Charlie Crist, both of whom have been ousted from the party, now
say that fraud concerns were advanced only as subterfuge for the law’s
main purpose: GOP victory.”

An election in Minnesota that was decided by a single vote may have had 35 of its votes cast in error, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.

State Rep. Mary Franson (R) edged challenger Bob Cunniff (D) by just one vote, but election officials discovered that poll workers mistakenly handed dozens of ballots to residents of a neighboring House district.

WSVN-TV: “Nearly a thousand ballots that were not included in Florida’s final count have been found in a warehouse in Broward County.”

Rick Hasen notes election officials say this is “routine” in the county.

Rick Hasen: “Think of all the problems in Florida: the on, again off again in-person absentee balloting in Miami Dade, put in place by local election officials against the wishes of the mayor to get around the cutbacks on early voting by the governor and legislature; the multiple ballot snafus in Palm Beach County; long lines in cites throughout the state; major problems in handling some absentee ballots; election officials in one county telling people that they could vote through the end of the day Wednesday.”

“Let’s declare Florida an election disaster area and bring in the feds.”

Mental Floss: “The glacial pace of presidential elections wasn’t a huge issue in the late 18th and early 19th centuries–communication was slow, so results took weeks to announce anyway–but with the advent of the railroad and telegraph, Congress decided it was time to standardize a date. Monday was out, because it would require people to travel to the polls by buggy on the Sunday Sabbath. Wednesday was also not an option, because it was market day, and farmers wouldn’t be able to make it to the polls. So it was decided that Tuesday would be the day that Americans would vote in elections, and in 1845, Congress passed a law that presidential elections would be held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.”

Mother Jones: “If you’re overseas and voting by mail in Connecticut this November, grab an aspirin and a pen with lots of ink. The state’s Supreme Court hadn’t resolved a partisan scuffle over who gets to be listed first on the ballot this year before overseas absentee ballots were dropped in the mail, so those voters will have to write in all the candidates’ names themselves.”

Three of powerful New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s (D) adult children “remained registered to vote in their father’s Lower East Side district long after moving out,” the New York Post reports.

“And they continued to vote for years at the same Delancey Street polling place as their parents — presumably pulling the lever for Papa in his re-election bids — even when, as in the case of one child, they lived out of state.”

Said a Silver spokesman: “The election law is clear that voters have wide latitude to vote from the residence they choose, so long as they are not dually registered. They all vote from only one place, and under New York law that is clearly legal.”

A dozen years after the razor close presidential race in 2000, Al Gore told Current TV that he now believes the presidency should be decided on the popular vote and not the Electoral College.

Said Gore: “I really do now think it’s time to change that. It’s always tough to amend the Constitution and risky to do so, but there is a very interesting movement under way that takes it state by state, that may really have a chance of succeeding.”

[Read more…]

A federal court blocked Texas from enforcing “a strict new voter identification law, ruling that the state had failed to prove that the mandate would not disproportionately suppress turnout among eligible voters who are members of minority groups,” the New York Times reports.

Rick Hasen: “Texas is likely to appeal this case to the Supreme Court, and I would expect to see an application for an emergency injunction allowing Texas to use its voter id law during the upcoming election. If this happens, this will be a major question for the Roberts Court, and it would have to be decided in short order. Given the closeness to the election, it is not clear to me that even if the Supreme Court disagrees on some of the analysis with the district court that it would grant such emergency relief.”

South Carolina state Rep. Alan Clemmons (R), the author of a voter ID law considered discriminatory by the Justice Department, testified in federal court that, “while crafting the bill, he had responded favorably to a friend’s racist email in support of the measure,” McClatchy reports.

An email from Ed Koziol said that if the legislature offered a reward for voter identification cards, “it would be like a swarm of bees going after a watermelon.”

Clemmons responded: “Amen, Ed, thank you for your support.”

However, Clemmons testified that he did not remember giving out packets of peanuts with cards that said “Stop Obama’s nutty agenda and support voter ID.”

Politico: “At least 5 million voters, predominantly young and from minority groups sympathetic to President Barack Obama, could be affected by an unprecedented flurry of new legislation by Republican governors and GOP-led legislatures to change or restrict voting rights by Election Day 2012.”

“Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia and Wisconsin, all viewed as important states this fall, each have enacted stricter ID laws. Florida and Ohio have cut back on early voting. And a whole host of other states have passed new ID laws as well.”