WSLS:   “Two more people have been charged with voting fraud offenses following a Virginia State Police investigation of voter registration irregularities from the 2008 general election that so far has yielded 40 arrests statewide.

Sheila J. Peterson, 53, was indicted Monday by a Chesterfield County grand jury on one felony count of making a false statement on an election form on Oct. 3, 2008, according to court records. Last week, Michael Anthony Harris, 50, was arrested in Chesterfield on a similar charge for an offense that occurred on Sept. 26, 2008, records show.”

From BernardGoldberg.com:

“With no insight into the operations and priorities of the Republican National Committee or the Romney campaign, perhaps my fears (bordering on a phobia) that the GOP is not prepared to prevent fraudulent conduct by the Obama campaign are ill-founded. Maybe the republicans are way ahead of me on this issue and my apprehension is needless???

 Post Gazette.

Editorial from the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Florida.

Florida officials need to move aggressively to make sure registered voters are qualified.

It’s no small issue.   …Purging names of dead people from the voting rolls is nothing new, but the state recently took its job to another level.

Supervisors of elections offices, including Duval’s, routinely
receive reports of deaths from Vital Statistics. But what happens if a
Florida voter dies outside the state? It’s more difficult to document
that. Thus, the state identified 53,000 dead residents that still were
on the rolls, including 3,600 in Duval County.

The issue appears more serious in South Florida, reports the Sun
Sentinel. Broward County removed 4,482 names of dead people, Miami-Dade
County dropped 4,860 and Palm Beach County dropped 6,682.

Some discussion how the campaign finance case “Citizens United” has bolstered democracy in Wisconsin, allowing rebuttal to large union political activities and advertising. @ Commentary

PrawfsBlawg posts on the recurring angst by some over Citizens United.

My own theory about the internal dynamics at work considers the history of individual justices, namely Justice Kennedy. Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the case Citizens United
overturned, was decided in 1990, during Justice Kennedy’s first full
term on the Court, and Kennedy wrote the principal dissent (joined by
O’Connor and Scalia). He likely had been itching to overturn that case
since 1990 and the change of personnel and passage of time gave him the
votes (save the Chief, at the outset) to finally do it.

…Why is so much ire aimed directly and uniquely at Citizens United,
out of the entire body of campaign finance law? Why is this case
perceived as the alpha and omega of bad law on the subject? Yes, Citizens United overturned Austin. But Austin was 20 years at this point, so it was hardly Justice Brandeis in Erie overturning Swift. And Austin
itself was arguably the First Amendment anomaly–the one and (at that
point) only time the Court had accepted the equality rationale for
regulating campaign spending (although it was equality in the guise of
corruption). Austin could not be reconciled with Bellotti v. Bank of Boston in 1980, which invalidated a ban on corporate expenditures in an issue election, or, more fundamentally, with Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. So why pick on Citizens rather than these earlier precedents, especially Buckley, which is the case that introduced the fundamental idea that expending money for expression is First-Amendment protected?

Editorial from the Washington Post:  THE ACCELERATING investigation into the 2010 election campaign of D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray has
produced titillating revelations of bogus money orders, shredded
records, a hidden wire and now, it appears, bald-faced lies to the FBI.
But at the heart of the federal investigation is something precious and
important: the integrity of the electoral process. What happened in
2010, as U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. made clear in a pull-no-punches statement, is that “the voters of the District of Columbia were deceived.”
The election of Mr. Gray (D), who campaigned against former
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) on a theme of restoring integrity to
government, was aided by secret payments, fraudulent filings, stealth
deals and dirty tricks.

Below is an excerpt from an outstanding article this week from Jacob Sullum in Reason.org on the debate over how or whether a case over speech restrictions became a battle about government censorship of books, commercials, and on-demand videos.  He concludes, it was always a battle over government censorship not merely regulating campaign finance.  In this digital and Internet age, the government’s appetite in regulating all different types and forms of speech, including even books and pamphlets, is invasive and concerning.

The proposed distinction between documentaries like Hillary:
The Movie (which the Court described as “a feature-length
negative advertisement”) and the “commercials” that
Toobin says were Congress’ real target raises similar problems: How
short can a permitted documentary be without becoming a prohibited
ad? Justice Anthony Kennedy posed another puzzler: Since BCRA’s ban on electioneering
communications refers to “satellite” communications, wouldn’t
it apply to an electronic book mentioning a federal candidate “if
it comes from a satellite”? What about books read on radio or
TV? Do they retain their talismanic paper value when converted to
audio? Contrary to the way Toobin presents it, the book
question—posed initially by Justice Samuel Alito, then pressed by
Kennedy and Roberts—was not a trick that “turned a fairly obscure
case about campaign-finance reform into a battle over government
censorship.” The battle was always about government censorship; the
question merely highlighted that point.

To provide more context, Sullum is analyzing Jeffrey Toobin’s article in the New Yorker Magazine.  Bottom Line:  The Supreme Court wasn’t playing games with the First Amendment.

In the midst of a heated election year, the director of the Defense
Department’s Federal Voting Assistance Program is stepping down.  Link.

A frightening story of a modern day high-tech Brownshirt can be found here.

“At 12:35 a.m. on July 1, 2011, sheriff’s deputies pounded on my front door and rang my doorbell. They shouted for me to open the door and come out with my hands up.  When I opened the door, deputies pointed guns at me and ordered me to put my hands in the air.”

What does this have to do with elections?  A person who is mentioned in the article linked below writes for the Brad Blog, a blog which relentlessly attacked Bush administration Voting Section staffers by name, in collaboration with employees within the Voting Section.

The story about the SWATTING and intimidation is shocking.  It might also be illegal.

18 USC 241 prohibits intimidation against Americans for exercising free speech rights.  The statute says:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

Read the astonishing story how a writer for the Brad Blog is included in the story about a person who may have engaged in a nationwide campaign of physical intimidation by placing false 911 calls sending midnight SWAT teams to the homes of conservatives.

I’ll have more on this shortly.

Updated.