There’s a shock.  All this announcement accomplishes is make it more likely the Mississippi Voter ID law will end up in federal court.

I figured out how to add a salesbar widget to Election Law Center.  Earlier I promised sales rank data periodically for the new election law books by John Fund/Hans von Spakovsky, and Tova Wang and Rick Hasen.  Rather than take the time to periodically update the sales rankings at Amazon, Novelrank has a way to do it automatically with widgets.

Important note – think of American Top 40 when you look at the rankings.  Lower is better.  Injustice reached #23 at Amazon and #13 at Barnes and Noble, then slowly “fell” from there, even though the numbers went “up.”

Scroll way down to the bottom of this page on the left to see sales rankings.  These three books all launch in August 2012, so the rankings will offer comparable data along the natural sales arc of a book.  Injustice launched in October of last year so it will be on a different arc, but  I included Injustice also in the sidebar.

Novel rank confesses that their “units sold” model underestimates.  They have no way to know actual sales by unit.  So they show a single book sold every time the ranking goes up.

One final note, as of now, nobody has bought Tova Wang’s book at Amazon so there is no sales ranking. Amazon won’t rank you until after your first sale.  So someone needs to make a purchase of her book and lift it out of hibernation.

The Union Leader is right: “Replacing the Senate’s text with the proposed House Election Law Committee amendment would be to kill our best shot at getting a solid voter ID law in place in time for the upcoming elections. The House should not do it. It should instead pass SB 289 to protect the integrity of the upcoming elections and revisit the issue next year if any improvements are needed.”

 Overseas, not military.  The rub:

“Mr. Carey said he had changed the wording in response to requests from state election officials. Voters from some states, he said, receive federal, state and local ballots only if they indicate an intention to return — no matter when — while those who express no intention to return receive only federal ballots.”

Exactly.  Overseas voters shouldn’t be participating in state elections if they never intend to return to the United States.  Good call by Bob Carey.

Mississippi Press link:  “On the Senate side, Josh Harkins’ district, as expected, retreated to Rankin County to offset population gains there. Sen. Will Longwitz picked up some of Harkins’ district, cementing District 25 as a Madison-based seat.

Of course, despite the positive features of the new maps, everything will have to be approved by the feds. And the Obama Justice Department seems to have a “special place” in its heart for Mississippi.

 RNLA Blog.

I will be live on the Marta Zoller show all over Georgia today at 10:15 talking about the Justice Department’s enforcement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

I noted yesterday that Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund have a new book coming out in August about vote fraud deniers, voter fraud and elections.  I said I “will be posting a regular sales scoreboard showing the sales ranking of Fund and Von Spakovsky’s ‘Who’s Counting’ compared with books by vote fraud denier Tova Wang and also Rick Hasen. I am anxious to see which book performs better in the marketplace of ideas, especially since Hasen saw fit to single out Fund and Von Spakovsky in his book.”

No time like the present.

All three books have an August release, so it is a fair compare on sales.  The Amazon sales rankings for nationwide sales as of 8 a.m. for the three are:

Fund/Von Spakovsky: 72,652
Hasen: 256,901
Wang: Not a single advance order at Amazon/no heartbeat.

Advantage Fund/Von Spakovsky.

On the topic of books, you can order Injustice here as well as peruse sale rankings.

North Carolina counties support photo ID laws to increase public confidence in election results.  Story here.

By a 3-2 vote, the Chatham County commissioners have approved a
resolution supporting state legislation that would require voter
identification at the polls to ensure that election results are
“fundamentally fair and every genuine vote is counted.”

“We made
sure that the resolution clearly states that any voter identification
requirements should be fair, reasonable and readily accessible to all
voters,” commissioners Chairman Brian Bock said. “This is an important
step in our view to retain public confidence in election results.

AP reports what a mess the South Carolina primary has become and predictably the military voters receive the brunt of incompetence and delay due to litigation.

South Carolina’s June 12 primary should be delayed because a state
Supreme Court decision removed nearly 200 candidates from ballots,
according to an attorney behind a federal lawsuit over the issue.

A delay is needed because state election officials
violated federal law when they sent ballots to overseas voters and
military members that only had federal races on them, Todd Kincannon
told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

“The ballots that they mailed out to military voters
are not worth the paper they are printed on,” Kincannon said. “Each and
every one of them is illegal because they are all in violation of the
Voting Rights Act.”

Under the Voting Rights Act, any changes to South
Carolina’s election law must be approved by the U.S. Department of
Justice because of the state’s past failure to protect blacks’ voting
rights. Kincannon said that, to comply with that requirement, the state
Election Commission would have needed the department’s approval before
sending the federal-only ballots.

“These guys have a right to vote in state elections, too,” Kincannon said. “You cannot make it up as you go along.”