This is going to be fun.  PDF here.

Why not?  Charlie Savage got one for doing the same thing, but not as well or a thoroughly.  Here’s more.

Correction officers at Rensselaer County Jail pushed to register inmates to vote in last fall’s primary and general election as part of an effort to unseat Sheriff Jack Mahar.

State and federal law enforcement agencies have launched broad investigations into the activities of the correction officers, including whether their initiative to garner inmates’ votes violated state or federal laws. The probes are part of a broader investigation that began when a group of correction officers accused their labor leaders of fraud and looting union dues for personal use. 

Story here.

Voter ID has been a hot topic for debate over the past year in
Minnesota. Now, it looks like it might have the legs to get on the
ballot in November.  Story here.

Nearly 60 witnesses, many of them disenfranchised voters, have
testified in the absentee ballot fraud trial so far before acting Supreme Court Judge George J. Pulver.  Special Prosecutor Trey Smith has entered about 190 items of evidence, and still has DNA and
handwriting experts on deck who are expected to testify going into the
trial’s fifth week.

Democratic elections Commissioner Edward McDonough and former City Councilman Michael LoPorto
have been on trial since Jan. 24 on numerous counts of forgery and
filing false documents for allegedly entering nearly 50 fraudulent
absentee ballots in the 2009 Working Families Party primary.  Democrats wanted to secure that line that year, a line that before usually went to the Republicans.

Story here.

Tuesday’s Spring Primary
Election will be relatively small, with voters in approximately 520 of
Wisconsin’s 1,850 cities, villages and towns going to the polls. These
primary elections typically have turnouts of less than 10 percent of
eligible voters. As a result, the G.A.B. does not anticipate major
problems with implementation of the new law at this election.

“We learned a great deal during soft implementation
of the Voter Photo ID Law last summer and fall,” said Nathaniel E.
Robinson, elections division administrator for the G.A.B. In those
elections, voters were asked for an ID, but were not required to show
one. “We have been training local election officials about the changes
in the law, and we have been educating and doing outreach to voters
across the state.”

In January, the G.A.B. launched its “Bring It to the
Ballot” campaign of public service announcements on TV, radio,
newspapers, billboards and the Internet. All of the videos and other
materials are available on the campaign’s website:
bringit.wisconsin.gov.

full story here

Politico has a lead story on challenges to Section 5 and what they characterize as an “siege on the Voting Rights Act.”  The modern reality is that the invasive and disproportionate nature of Section 5 with the concurrent lack of justification for such unequal treatment of only certain states in 2012 threatens equal application of the Voting Rights Act.  Those challenging Section 5 will be giving the Supreme Court the opportunity to mend the Voting Rights Act from the potentially current unconstitutional application of Section 5.  An excerpt from the article:   

The lawsuit brought by Shelby County was argued this month at the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and could be on a fast track
for the Supreme Court.

The provision “was constitutional in 1965 and 1975. And Alabama was,
shamefully, a big reason why,” said a brief filed in November by lawyers
for Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange. “But in part because of
Section 5, Alabama has changed, and the statute is no longer a necessary
and proper means of redressing constitutional injury.”

Strange’s brief argues that African Americans now serve in the state
Legislature at rates comparable to their percentage of the population
and that white and black voters have about the same registration rate.

Voting Rights Act critics also say the list of 16 states that get
special scrutiny is badly outdated. “It makes no sense [now] for the
State of Texas but not the State of Arkansas to be covered,” Blum said.

A series of cases filed recently by South Carolina and other states
seek approval for voter ID laws and other voting changes. However, some
of those cases also hint that the act’s pre-clearance provision could be
unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court Friday blocked Montana from enforcing state
restrictions on corporate political spending while the high court
considers arguments that those restrictions, enacted in the century-old
Montana Corrupt Practices Act, were nullified by the 2010 Citizens
United ruling.

WSJ article here.

“Ouch.”

Just as important is how this flawed system highlights the need for
tougher voter ID laws. After all, if 2 million dead people are on the
active voter rolls, how difficult would it be to use those registrations
to illicitly tip a close election?

Law enforcement is now taking action in direct
response to an NBC2 investigation involving potential voter fraud. It
comes after we uncovered non U.S. citizens who were registered to vote.

The Collier County Sheriff’s office is
investigating two voters who admit they are not U.S. citizens, yet cast
ballots in numerous elections.  “This
is the first year we’ve actually had a complaint come in that
non-citizens were voting,” said Sergeant David White, who is assigned to
the county’s economic crimes unit.

White
got the names from the Supervisor of Elections office after the NBC2
Investigators examined jury excusal forms where residents said they
couldn’t serve because they were not U.S. citizens. We found nearly 100 of those names in the database of Florida registered voters. So far, Lee and Collier county election supervisors have removed 34 of those people from the voter rolls.

Link here.