The Washington Post reports that the congressional map continued to shift toward red states based on new apportionment data.  Texas and Florida gained 4 and 2 seats respectively and New York loses 2.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the impact on the electoral college map. 

tweet take-away: Census shifts 6 from Obama states to McCain states. 

Washington Post has more.

The petitions were being collected for a group seeking to change Arlington County government’s form.  It was a coalition of firefighters, Green Party and Republican Party members.  The person who collected more than a third of the signatures was a convicted felon, ineligible to do so.  More from another Washington Post story:

“Then Lindberg found that Cheryl Simmons, a felon and therefore not a registered voter by Virginia law, had collected the third-most signatures for the group.  Simmons was convicted in 2006 of felony embezzlement, having given friends and family members discounts at the Hecht’s department store where she worked, police said.”

The Wisconsin attorney general is asking an appeals court to ponder if laws barring felons from voting are discriminatory.

“A brief filed by the [Wisconsin] DOJ this month accuses the men of trying to do an end run around the justice system by claiming their initial convictions for bail jumping were also racist. The men claim the felon disenfranchisement law is racist because the majority of people on probation or parole in the state are African-American.”

“The men created a scheme where they filed falsified applications for absentee ballots, obtained the ballots and then illegally voted.”

Full story at St. Louis Today.

A challenge to the outcome of Texas House District 48 has been filed in Travis County.  The contest was decided by 12 votes.  The complaint is here.

Dan Neil, the Republican filed the lawsuit attacking the certification on a wide range of very interesting matters. Included among these is a claim that over 1,900 ineligible voters are on the rolls, including dead people that voted.  This will be a rather elementary matter to prove if in fact people voted in the names of the dead.  Score one for Texas Voter ID if true, also. 

Next, the complaint alleges that overseas ballots were treated, shall we say, very poorly.  In particular, overseas and military voters were told in written instructions that they could vote a straight party ticket, and did in fact vote a straight party GOP ticket, only to learn that their votes for some contests were thrown out.  On the other hand, straight part Democrat votes on overseas ballots were counted. 

If the plaintiff finds any ineligible votes cast, the Texas Voter ID legislation may have found a contemporary rational basis to support the law.

Tabella has this excellent posting here about the soon-to-be-law in Texas requiring a photo identification to vote.  ELC has repeatedly explained why states and jurisdictions are better off going straight to court than they are subjecting themselves to the behind closed doors process at the DOJ.  More here and here.

You must be registered to vote to run for election.  But if you are a felon in Texas, you cannot be registered to vote.  But there is a loophole, if you are elected, but are a felon, then you can continue to serve in the Texas Legislature.  Sort of hard to believe.  But the story is here at the Austin American Statesman.

“Rep. Kino Flores, D-Palmview, who, despite recent felony convictions, is still state Rep. Kino Flores, D-Palmview. Travis County jurors convicted him on six charges — four felonies, two misdemeanors — of not properly disclosing his income on required state forms.”

The Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice has shown its hand to Congress. It wants more money and federal employees in the Voting Section.   What is the new litigation priority?  Dead people on the voter rolls?  Minority vote dilution?  Helping Spanish speaking voters?  Nope.  As reported last week in the Washington Examiner, those issues are genuinely “closed for business” at the Holder DOJ.

Instead, the DOJ has told Congress in this document  that they want more money and staff, get this, to ensure that welfare and other public assistance agencies are registering as many voters as possible.  Section 7 of the Motor Voter law enacted in 1993 requires welfare agencies and DMV’s to offer voter registration opportunities.  It also requires military recruitment facilities to do the same, but don’t expect much attention there. 

Section 8 of Motor Voter is the counterpart to Section 7, and it requires that the rolls be kept clean and free from ineligible, dead and felon voters.  Sections 7 and 8 represented a compromise in Congress.  Without 8, there wouldn’t have been a Section 7.  The Bush Administration enforced both provisions, but change has come to Washington.  Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes announced that the Obama DOJ would not be enforcing Section 8 because it doesn’t “have anything to do with increasing minority turnout.”

The budget request notes there are active investigations of states taking place.  That means that undercover DOJ employees are trolling around welfare agencies, hanging out in the lobby, and grabbing welfare applicants and chatting them up to see if they were offered a voter registration card. They will interview individuals who have just been inside welfare agencies.  It is a labor intensive investigation. 

You don’t suppose an aggressive welfare agency voter registration crackdown by DOJ would have anything to do with the 2012 Presidential election would you?  It’s not like the DOJ has shown a lack of interest in enforcing the voting rights of, say, military members, have they?  I wonder who voters who are registering at public assistance agencies might vote for.  There’s just no way tell.

The DOJ budget document quoted below describes the Voting Section priorities, and nary a word about enforcing Section 8 in addition to welfare agency registration enforcement:

“Instituting and maintaining an aggressive affirmative litigation program: The Voting  Section also enforces the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). The NVRA requires that individuals be given the opportunity to register to vote when applying for services at public assistance or disability offices under Section 7 of the NVRA or State driver license agencies under Section 5 of the NVRA. These provisions of Federal law must be vigorously enforced if groups who have been chronic nonparticipants in the American democratic process in the past are to be become active voters in the future. In the recent past, the Voting Section has entered into two out-of-court settlements with Arizona and Illinois regarding the failure of those States to comply with the public assistance agency voter registration requirements of the NVRA. Importantly, the Voting Section has a number of active statewide investigations in other states regarding possible failures to comply with Section 7 of the NVRA, and these investigations will be informed by the biannual nationwide NVRA report issued by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in July 2009. The Administration has already informed the Voting Section that it expects it to mount a vigorous Section 7 initiative in the coming months and years, and the Voting Section intends to carry out this mission with an eye toward investigatory reviews and, if appropriate, enforcement actions against those States that are not complying with Section 7. The requested additional resources will be used in part to fund this Section 7 enforcement work, which is very resource intensive.”