Democrats fight to break the compromise struck last year in the New Hampshire legislature.

Rep. Todd Rokita appeared on the Dana Show in St. Louis and Indianapolis yesterday.  It looks like the Justice Department Voting Section is going to get some scrutiny for the unwillingness to bring Section 8 cases to clean up voter rolls.  “Fact of the matter is with the Civil Rights Division and [the Voting Section] they are way too selective on what they focus on.  It’s all upside down.”  Audio link below.

Interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal from a historian, in fact, the President of the Society of Historians.  You won’t find current academia teaching this history to their students.  No, they are still fixated on those “dirty rotten stinking WASP Protestant Republicans.”

Those were the days when it was glorious to be a Democrat. As a historian, I give talks from time to time. In a recent one, called “Us Against Them,” I said it was we Irish and our Italian, Polish and other ethnic allies against “the dirty rotten stinking WASP Protestant Republicans of New Jersey.” By thus demeaning the opposition, we had clear consciences as we rolled up killer majorities using tactics that had little to do with the election laws.

My grandmother Mary Dolan died in 1940. But she voted Democratic for the next 10 years. An election bureau official came to our door one time and asked if Mrs. Dolan was still living in our house. “She’s upstairs taking a nap,” I replied. Satisfied, he left.

Thousands of other ghosts cast similar ballots every Election Day in Jersey City. Another technique was the use of “floaters,” tough Irishmen imported from New York who voted five, six and even 10 times at various polling places.

….I have to laugh when I hear current-day Democrats not only lobbying against voter-identification laws but campaigning to make voting even easier than it already is. More laughable is the idea of dressing up the matter as a civil-rights issue.

My youthful outlook on life—that anything goes against the rotten stinking WASP Protestant Republicans—evaporated while I served in the U.S. Navy in World War II. In that conflict, millions of people like me acquired a new understanding of what it meant to be an American.

Later I became a historian of this nation’s early years—and I can assure President Obama that no founding father would tolerate the idea of unidentified voters. These men understood the possibility and the reality of political corruption. They knew it might erupt at any time within a city or state.

Forbes.com contributes to the debate and cites to data to rebut the Democrats attempt to play victim at every turn. 

Democrats waited in line an average of 15 minutes to cast their vote versus Republicans’ 12.4 minutes. Strangely, Independents (whom both sides thought they would win) stood in line as long as Democrats.

Although the MIT study does not give margins of error, the 2.6 minute average difference in waiting time surely falls within a reasonable margin of error. The correct Times headline should therefore be: “No differences between Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in waiting time to vote in 2012.”

…While different voters indeed experience different waiting times to vote, differences are explained by poll congestion in large cities and/or whether the voter chooses to vote early. They are not the consequence of systematic attempts to bias election results.

My book Injustice was published sixteen months ago.  In it I documented the false scholarship of Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan and her false statements in a Duke Law journal about the Bush administration civil rights enforcement records.  These weren’t differences of opinion, these were outright falsehoods. They were published in Pamela S. Karlan, “Lessons Learned: Voting Rights and the Bush Administration,” 4 Duke J. Const. L. & Pub. Pol’y 17 (2009).

I even testified to the House Judiciary Committee about her false scholarship.

Almost a month ago, I asked the question: Do Any Law Professors Have the Guts to Call Out Karlan’s False Scholarship?

Now we know the answer: No, they have no guts. 

Not a one of all the “scholars” who place such value on accurate scholarship, thorough recounting of history, or even whether someone will give up a grand jury report, have called Karlan out.  That’s the state of the academy: a small cloistered echo chamber where the same dozen people appear at conferences and speak to the same two dozen and a smattering of captive students about the world as they see it.  One thing is for sure, making up outright falsehoods won’t result in your eviction from the echo chamber.  Lying about the Bush administration won’t get you ejected from the left wing election law echo chamber, it will elevate you to Queen of the Chamber.

Southern Poverty Law Center reports were used by a would-be killer for plotting murder.

Lets hope the SPLC reports that name some mainstream groups as hate groups aren’t taken so seriously in the future. 

With the USPS announcing it will end Saturday mail delivery effective August 2013, Johnson County, Kansas’ Election Commissioner ponders what effect the cut in mail service will have on election administration, “an industry that is actually looking to increase the use of the Postal Service.”

Minot Daily News.

“The bill, drafted at the request of N.D. Secretary of State Al Jaeger, is an obvious reaction to last year’s incident involving 10 members of the North Dakota State University football team. The players pleaded guilty to faking signatures and were sentenced to community service and probation.

But the damage inflicted by last year’s fraud went much further than those convicted. Because so many signatures were invalidated, two petitions failed to make it on the November ballot.”

The scholars weigh in on Shelby with scholarly experience and the university perspective from campus.