Charlie Cook at National Journal looks at the decline of swing seats, a potential Republican advantage and finds redistricting to be a secondary factor.  So one conclusion can be drawn from the data:  It may have helped pad the majority but the Republican majority is not a result of gerrymandering.

The trend lines are clear. In 1998, we found 164 swing
seats—districts within 5 points of the national partisan average, with
scores between R+5 and D+5 (a score of R+5 means the district’s vote for
the Republican presidential nominees was 5 percentage points above the
national average). The data 15 years ago showed just 148 solidly
Republican districts and 123 solidly Democratic seats. Today, only 90
swing seats remain—a 45 percent decline—while the number of solidly
Republican districts has risen to 186 and the count of solidly
Democratic districts is up to 159.

…How did we get here as a country? Debates
rage at political-science conferences: Are voters aligning in
like-minded areas, or is blatant partisan gerrymandering to blame? Our
newest index points mostly to the former, which has in turn amplified
the power of the latter. In 2011 and 2012, redistricting diminished the
number of swing seats from 103 to 99. But when we factored in the 2012
election results, the count fell more sharply, from 99 to 90.

In
fact, setting aside redistricting, we found that 76 percent of
Democratic-held House seats had grown even more Democratic in the past
four years and 60 percent of GOP-held seats had grown even more
Republican. Some districts swung dramatically, mostly along racial
lines. Republican Rep. Hal Rogers’s 96 percent white district in eastern
Kentucky jumped from R+16 to R+25, and Democratic Rep. Loretta
Sanchez’s 82 percent nonwhite district in Orange County, Calif., moved
from D+3 to D+9.

“Under the guise of modernizing the elections processes and increasing voter turnout, Democrats have submitted a bill that will leave the state wide open to fraud.”  Washington Times.

A history lesson on absentee ballot fraud in North Carolina from Observer.com as absentee ballot reform is considered by Republicans in the North Carolina legislature to require absentee voters provide their social security number of drivers license number.

For decades the Democratic organizations that ruled North Carolina
would ship thousands of absentee ballots to machine-controlled mountain
counties that would provide as many votes as were needed.

The 1920
governor’s race was almost certainly stolen that way. The
machine-backed candidate, Cameron Morrison, finished second when the
voting was completed on Election Day. But after 11 days of counting
absentee votes trickling in from the mountain counties, he was declared
winner of the Democratic nomination by 87 votes. That was at a time when
North Carolina was a one-party state and Democratic factions stole
elections from each other.

During the 1936 Democratic primary for
governor, the state Board of Elections, controlled by the Democratic
machine, sent out 108,250 absentee ballots in a runoff in which 480,000
votes were cast. Most were sent to mountain counties. A 1944 study found
that the statewide percentage of absentee ballots cast was 6.7 percent,
but in hard-fought mountain counties such as Clay it was as high as 26
percent.

Typically when absentee voting started, both parties
contacted certain voters to see if they wanted to vote absentee. One
label for these voters was “floating voters.” According to one mountain
Democrat, whoever obtained the majority of those voters usually won.

Old mountain pols say the tradition of using absentee ballots to help steal elections continued into modern times.

 Link.

 Link:

Elections law attorney Christian Adams said the groups had pledged more than $100 million to three procedural issues: restricting spending on political advertisements, expanding voter rolls while blocking voter ID laws, and reforming Senate rules to curb the filibuster.

North Dakota House has approved the Senate’s amendments to a voter identification bill. The House then voted 68-24 to pass House Bill 1332 on Friday afternoon.

 PJ Media:  “Project Vote’s Deputy Director Amy Busefink is busy lobbying the Texas Legislature on election integrity issues – trying to stop Texas from checking to see if Texas voters are registered in multiple states. She recently organized a letter of various left wing groups trying to stop legislation before the Texas House Election Committee. Members of the Texas legislature shouldn’t take Busefink seriously – she has a history of participating in voter fraud.”

link.

The Washington Times reveals how a federal bureaucracy starts to believe the steady stream of rhetoric from the so-called “reform community” and become an organ of it.  A bureaucracy and staff that fails to reflect the diversity of both parties and differing legal approaches to campaign finance laws is destined for failure.  Such harassment gives fodder to those who want to rein in the federal agency. To the story:

Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-affiliated conservative group that
spent at least $30 million on issue ads and other advocacy leading
up to Election Day, is darn tired of being asked by the Federal
Election Commission to tell the public where it gets its money and
how it spends it.  The FEC says that if donations were given to
Crossroads GPS for the specific purpose of running issue ads —
which, to the public, appears to be the group’s main purpose —
Crossroads GPS should disclose those donations. Prodded by the agency
on Thursday, Caleb Crosby, the group’s treasurer, responded in a tone
not normally seen in official correspondence.

“This request is
the fourth such [notification] we have received on this exact same
subject,” he wrote. “If the cited provision has any relevance
whatsoever to the reporting of contributions in connection with
independent expenditures, it is, by its own terms, inapplicable to
Crossroads GPS. As we have noted before in response to your [requests
for additional information], Crossroads GPS is familiar with and
understands the applicable reporting regulations.“If the
organization receives any contributions that are required to be
reported … those contributions will be reported as required,” he
wrote.

 PJ Media.