Forbes link.  Some highlights:

“Section 5 has also become a partisan weapon cloaked in the noble history of civil rights.  In the South Carolina case, Section 5 was a way for the federal government to abuse power for partisan ends.  Holder’s objection to the common sense South Carolina law in December 2011 was intended to energize a moribund political base.

The emergency in 2011 was very different than in 1965.  In 1965, evil practices kept blacks from voting, and Section 5 solved that.  In 2011, the President faced a political emergency.  Black voters were unenthused about Obama’s reelection, and a Section 5 objection solved that, at South Carolina’s expense. . . .

Even the coverage formula itself is clumsy. Among the states subject to Section 5 are New York. Michigan and New Hampshire.  Coverage of New Hampshire was so clumsy that Justice Department bureaucrats took it upon themselves to ignore the law for decades and not require compliance.  But law should matter more than the whims of bureaucrats, and Section 5 has been a corrosive force on that score. . . .

Unfortunately, Section 5 has corroded the integrity of the Department of Justice in other ways.  Courts have imposed monetary sanctions on DOJ attorneys for abuses and dishonesty in the Section 5 review process.  One current Section 5 DOJ staff reviewer was found to have recently committed perjury during the course of an investigation by the DOJ Inspector General.  Yet that employee still reviews important state election laws for the Justice Department.”

 A report on Section 5 and the Voter ID implications in Virginia (which applies equally to MS and AL).

“Something else that might be the DOJ’s undoing? Recent controversies over things like Benghazi and tapping phone records, on top of internal problems in the DOJ unit that reviews Section 5 issues.”

The Federalist Society has released this white paper which I authored on Voter ID, a summary of developments across the country.

More evidence that the decisions by Eric Holder, Tom Perez and Chris Herren are paying off: thousands of ineligible voters registered in Maryland and multiple states:

But that’s not all the Maryland GOP found. Using voter management software, it compared voter lists with national change-of-address data from the U.S. Postal Service and discovered that 268,004 voters no longer live at the same address at which they registered. That number includes 11,170 former Marylanders who now reside in Virginia, 11,113 who have since moved to Pennsylvania, 4,352 who now live in Delaware, and 3,696 whose current address is in New York.

The anti-Semite and racist Louis Farrakhan teamed up with supporters of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Alabama to rally in support of Section 5.  Alabama Senators like Hank Sanders apparently never saw the perception problem of having a black nationalist racist anti-Semite like Farrakhan out front in support of the Defendants in the Shelby challenge to Section 5, which of course illustrates one of the problems with Section 5.

Someone involved in the Section 5 rallies, however, saw what Sanders could not:

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Pastor Arthur Price Jr. this morning said Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is not speaking at the downtown Birmingham institution as part of a caravan supporting the Voting Rights Act on Friday. . . .Price said he “was surprised” to hear that Farrakhan would be at the church. “I didn’t know if that was outside the church,” he said. “We never intended on Mr. Farrakhan speaking here.”

Everything you need to know.

The state Senate agreed Wednesday to negotiate with the House on new, but differing voter identification and voter registration requirements reflected in separate versions of bills that have been debated throughout the legislative session.   Link.

The Supreme Court is poised to decide the case known as Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., which could have implications much broader than the matter of whether extra identification must be presented if a person without a driver’s license is trying to register to vote in Arizona.