I will be testifying to the House Judiciary Committee (Constitution Sub) about the DOJ Voting Section on Wednesday morning at 9 a.m.  Joining me will be Cleta Mitchell and Eric Eversole.  Stay tuned for links and written testimony here.  Topics include military voting, Section 203 (speak English “well” still counts against 10,000), Voter ID, and the lack of Section 8 enforcement.  Posting here.

Ohio’s elections chief is violating the state constitution by requiring county election boards to follow a federal court decree instead of state law when it comes to counting provisional ballots, GOP lawmakers alleged in a lawsuit Monday.   

Cherlyn Harley LeBon of Project 21 Black Leadership Council on Voter ID on WNDRadio.

 Newsmax.

 Details.

 The Defense Department Press Release here.  “His work on civil rights continued with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed voting rights for all people, regardless of race.

Johnson signed legislation establishing Medicare, which allowed millions of elderly Americans access to cheaper medical services. He also launched the Head Start Program, which provided preschool children from low-income families with classes, medical care, and other services.”

 Philly.com.

Here is a story about American elections from the United Arab Emirates.  It reads like some bizarre radio signal bounce from a distant star, unclear, filled with static, hazy and skewed.  (This was a plot in a movie, Contact??, where audio of Hitler radio transmissions returned to Earth in a retransmission that took light years).

The article’s strange start:

“Imagine a country without an election commission, where the state makes no effort to prepare an electoral register at national, regional, or provincial level, where it is left to citizens get themselves on the register, and where the ruling party in every province writes the rules and procedures for registration and then conducts the poll and the count. Imagine a country where a federal court decision has been necessary to bar voter intimidation by party supporters who demand to see voters’ identification at polling stations, challenge voters’ credentials, film them as they vote, distribute leaflets stating the penalties for voting fraud, and bombard selected neighbourhoods with junk mail, which is often returned undelivered and then used by party zealots to claim that the voters concerned do not live at the addresses shown on the electoral roll.”

Game on.  I’ll imagine it.  But it isn’t the United States of America.

“Voter intimidation in the US is hardly new, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has published several reports on the Republicans’ methods for interfering with citizens’ freedom to vote.”

My heavens, the Soros funded Brennan Center has cred in the Gulf States?  It seems so:

“Voter fraud minimal: The fact is, however, that there is almost no voter fraud in the US.”

The lecture from the mideast continues:

“Yet the Republican allegations of voter fraud, however devoid of proof, divert the media from a deadly serious threat to American democracy, namely the bewildering variety of electoral registration processes which Republican-held states in particular have created.”

The only thing bewildering is whether this slop was run through a Google translator or if people somewhere in the United Arab Emirates really wrote this in English.

And now the signal skip from a distant star, about 2.5 light years away: “The lawyer, David Iglesias, who is in fact a Republican supporter, added that his political seniors were looking for ‘improperly politicised US attorneys’ to file bogus cases. The Bush administration then sacked him and six of his colleagues for refusing to bring illegal prosecutions in ‘baseless cases against innocent citizens.’”

David Iglesias?!  Doesn’t he have a book?  I believe so, but I have forgotten the title.

 Washington Times:

“Much of the blame for this recurring nightmare rests with the Department of Justice and its Voting Section. Time and again, the Voting Section has been dilatory in its investigations and has failed to take timely action. These failures were well documented in 2010.

But, even when the Voting Section does act, the negotiated settlements with states often lack meaningful relief or real consequences for the local election officials who missed the deadline.

State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is “surprised and disappointed.”  Bloomberg reports:

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of a lower-court judge’s ruling last month that the state’s voter-identification requirement is unconstitutional.  In an accompanying order issued today, the state’s top court also declined to review another judge’s order that temporarily blocked enforcement of the requirement that voters appear at their polling places bearing a government-issued photo identification.

The same day the orders were released, trial began in one of the voter ID challenges, Milwaukee Branch of the NAACP v. Walker.  Meanwhile, Governor Walker, who signed voter ID into law, faces recall elections May 8 (primary) and June 5, presumably without the safeguard of voter ID.  And coincidentally, Judge David Flanagan, who issued the temporary injunction blocking enforcement of voter ID and is hearing NAACP v. Walker, signed a petition to recall Walker.