The bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission on Federal
Election Reform recommended back in 2005, when it called photo
identification of voters one of the “five pillars” of fair elections.

Link to story.

Progressives will need to do much better, too, at making clear our commitment to election integrity. …[P]rogressives look Pollyannaish if we belittle concerns about
election integrity. After all, politicians have been trying to stuff the
ballot box since senators wore togas. It was progressive reformers who
fought for decades to improve the honesty and integrity of elections.

A link to the story.  Expect a retraction within the week.

Republicans trying to discredit Arizona’s current legislative-district
map told a federal court Monday that the new political lines were drawn
deliberately to benefit Democrats and dilute the power of GOP voters.  Link here.

Because of the grotesquely swollen place the presidency now occupies
in the nation’s governance and consciousness, we are never not
preoccupied with presidential campaigning. The Constitution’s Framers
would be appalled. The nation reveres the Framers, but long ago
abandoned the presidential selection process they considered so
important that they made it one of the four national institutions
created by the Constitution. Hence the significance of the Republican
National Committee’s suggested reforms for the 2016 process.

University
of Virginia professor James Ceaser says the four national institutions
the Framers created were Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidency and
the presidential selection system based on the Electoral College. The
fourth, wherein the selection of candidates and election of a president
by each state’s electors occurred simultaneously — they were the same
deliberation — soon disappeared. 

Responding to the fact that the
2012 nomination process was ruinously protracted, the RNC suggests
reforms that might, like many improvements, make matters worse. This is
because of a prior “improvement” — campaign finance reform.   For more and the conclusion: Here.

The Hamilton County Board of Elections Tuesday subpoenaed records from
nine of Hamilton County’s 11 UPS stores after a registered voter alerted
the board that 47 voters had registered via the stores’ mailbox
service. 

Apparently, citizen voter action prompted this investigation:

The voter, Marlene Kocher, found 47 voters were registered at nine UPS
stores. The Board of Elections found 18 of the voters had cast ballots
in the November 2012 election. “The accuracy of our voter rolls is
critical to election integrity,” said Kocher, a Green Township resident
who is a member of the tea party-affiliated Ohio Voter Integrity
Project.

More at Cincinnati.com

Washington Post reports:  Gov. Robert F. McDonnell has signed a bill that would require voters
to present a photo ID to cast a ballot as soon as fall 2014.  McDonnell also issued an executive order directing the State
Board of Elections to implement a plan to inform the public about the
changes. The board also would help people lacking appropriate photo
identification to obtain IDs before the 2014 elections, when the measure
would take effect.

Washington Examiner has it.

Here is a letter from Representative Frank Wolf to Attorney General Eric Holder about the Voting Section.  Holder goes before Wolf’s committee (which has funding oversight of Justice) in a few weeks. 

The letter calls says the Voting Section suffers from systemic mismanagement.  It demands that people be terminated.  It calls the Civil Rights Division a “rat’s nest.”  Wolf controls the DOJ budget. 

Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe vetoed the recently passed photo voter ID law even after receiving an opinion from the Democratic Attorney General Dustin McDaniel upholding the legal standing of the proposed legislation. The opinion essentially says that the legislation is not an additional qualification to vote and very likely constitutional as other similar laws have been found across the country.  This interpretation was certainly not the opinion that Governor Beebe was hoping to serve as the basis of his veto.  Instead, the Arkansas Governor criticized voter ID proponents for the cost of the bill ($300,000), increased government spending and government bureaucracy for an unnecessary measure.  Of course, the Arkansas GOP was critical of the veto of a bill that had bipartisan majorities and pushed for an override of the veto.

 The Washington Examiner Opinion page today has this joint op ed I did with Christopher Coates.

“Senators of both parties should be reluctant to confirm nominee Thomas E. Perez as Labor secretary because he has provided inaccurate testimony under oath.

The explosive report by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz details the existence of an open and toxic hostility inside the DOJ toward bringing voting rights cases to protect white victims of discrimination. When Perez testified before the Civil Rights Commission in May 2010, he denied he had ever heard of any such hostility. His testimony was false.