The Wall Street Journal report on Shelby tells you everything you may need to know. 

Two and out:

Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who was defending the law, whether the government was contending that citizens in the South were more racist than those in Northern states. The chief justice was ready with statistics intended to rebut such images, telling Mr. Verrilli that Massachusetts clocked the nation’s lowest ratio of black turnout to that of whites, while Mississippi had the highest.

Link.

The (New Mexico) House has rejected a Republican-backed proposal to require voters to show identification at the polls in New Mexico. The proposal failed on a party-line 38-31 vote Monday. A GOP lawmaker
offered the proposal as the House debated legislation expanding access
to early voting sites in rural areas.  

Link to story.  The Democrats reject a voter integrity measure for the voting process in New Mexico because they inaccurately believe this would negatively impact their voters.  Drinking the kool-aid. 

U.S. Rep. Candice Miller, relying upon her experiences as Michigan
secretary of state, is denouncing President Obama’s plan to form a
national election commission which will seek solutions to long waits for
voters on Election Day. 

Link.

The vote failed earlier this week when too many Republican state senators broke for lunch early.   This time, the budget appropriation passed.  Another example of the high burden of Section 5.

The Mississippi Senate on Tuesday approved $695,000 for the secretary
of state to defend a proposed voter identification law, and the budget
bill moves on to the House for more work.The
secretary of state’s overall $13 million budget for fiscal 2014 was
rejected last week, but several senators were out of the chamber at the
time. During a second vote Tuesday when attendance was better, senators
passed the measure

The Washington Times opines: “Section 5 is a relic of a bygone era, and should go the way of Jim Crow. Justice Kennedy — and the court— should vote accordingly.”

The lawyers for dozens of voters and advocacy groups opposed to the maps
spent nearly five hours Monday making their case mostly on computer
monitors. There they showed boundaries of many of the 30 state House
districts, 16 Senate districts and three U.S. House districts they argue
are unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.

Link to the full story.

Hawaii is attempting to address illegal assistance.  “House lawmakers will consider prohibiting Hawaii employers, unions and candidates from helping voters complete their ballots after a committee approved a bill aimed at preventing voter fraud.”

The bill, however, might run afoul of Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act.  For example, if a voter wanted a candidate to assist them, it’s hard to see how a state can ban that.  Suppose a candidate’s 98 year old grandmother needed help voting.  The Voting Rights Act allows the candidate to assist her.  The Hawaii bill seems to ban it.

Some weeks ago I issued a challenge to academia: who will be the first to have the guts to call out the dishonest voting rights scholarship of Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan?

Karlan published patently false statements in a Duke Law journal about the Bush administration’s voting enforcement record.  From ELC:

She should be embarrassed and ashamed for publishing false statements in the Duke University Law review. (Pamela S. Karlan, “Lessons Learned: Voting Rights and the Bush Administration,” 4 Duke J. Const. L. & Pub. Pol’y 17 (2009)). She has no room to criticize George Will for imprecise language. From my book Injustice (page 162):

“These arguments—that the Brown case was the first Section 2 case brought by the Bush DOJ, and that for five years no case was brought to protect minority voters—are common untruths told by critics of the Bush administration. Stanford Law professor Pam Karlan peddled this nonsense in a published law review article that falsely states ‘for five of the eight years of the Bush Administration, [they] brought no Voting Rights Act cases of its own except for one case protecting white voters.’ In a footnote, Karlan says she relied on Obama Voting Section chief Chris Herren for information for her article.”

Karlan’s scholarship was patently false, and she has never corrected it as far as I know.  Soon after publishing that post, I asked:

So where are all the law professors who love to snipe at any statement made by a conservative with which they might quibble? Where are the guardians of precision and honesty when it comes to Karlan’s falsehoods? Maybe one of them will have the guts to call Karlan out on her false statements in the Duke Law piece. Will the Ivory Tower call out another professor for false scholarship?

As expected, all we heard from the ivory tower about Karlan’s false scholarship was – crickets.

Today Democrat activist posing as a law professor Rick Hasen has a blog posting at Reuters about the Shelby case which mentions Karlan. 

Does Hasen at last call out Karlan for publishing false information in an academic journal?  Does he display intellectual honesty and finally draw attention to the defects in Karlan’s past voting rights work?  After all, this is the same professor who pestered Hans von Spakovsky to turn over a grand jury report that von Spakovsky took the time to obtain (and Hasen could have done the same).  This is  the same professor that took to Twitter and his blog to demand that this blog remove a posting that accurately reported the information received that Hasen had been challenged to a debate.  I haven’t seen any posting by the same professor that Karlan should correct her phony Duke Law review article.

Instead, we get a pleasant passing reference about Karlan:

“But in the wide public debate about this case, we are getting to the point where — as election law scholar Pam Karlan has noted — everything has been said, but not necessarily by everybody.”

How sweet.  The “election law scholar’s” scholarship, particularly in the Duke Law review, is not mentioned.  We would expect no less from him, because he is not an equal opportunity pest.  Conservatives must correct blogs about debates and turn over grand jury reports to the inquisitor.  But if a fellow left wing academic happens to lie in a law journal, just brush that aside in the interest of solidarity, you see. 

UPDATED: “Scholar” Rick Hasen Resorts to Name Calling.

Responding to state Democrats’ calls to drop his challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office replied:

“Critics raise these concerns because they are afraid of losing at the Supreme Court. Why would critics trust a lower court, but not the highest court, to decide this issue? More importantly, why do critics continue to fight against laws intended to prevent cheating and illegal voting at the ballot box? … Those same critics also know that Latinos are repeatedly victimized by voter fraud and Texans of all races strongly support voter ID. They need to stop playing politics and start preventing illegal voting in Texas.”