Kirsten Clarke, et al, in a letter to Chris Herren, Voting Section Chief of at the Justice Department, requests DOJ to object to the new Florida law designed to cut down on mischief involving Acorn-style voter registration drives.  The Florida law does three primary things: 1) limit the time Acorn-style groups can sit on voter registration forms they have collected, 2) compress the dates of early voting but keep the same number of hours, and 3) require voters who no longer live where they are registered to cast a provisional ballot to be verified later in the precinct they have moved to but failed to move their voter registration.  These three requirements, according to Clarke and the NAACP, are racially discriminatory.  Read the full letter here.

Florida may have gravely miscalculated by sending this law to the Justice Department for approval.  Instead, Florida could have gone straight to the United States District Court in D.C. for approval by a judge.  Because Florida instead chose to submit to Eric Holder’s Justice Department, it opened the door for lobbying by Clarke and other well connected racial interest groups.  Consider Virginia.  Virginia knew that it was a bad idea to submit only to the DOJ and instead also went to court for approval of its redistricting plan, which it got yesterday.  Because the case was before the court, badgering by Clarke and others were effectively ignored.  The DOJ felt the heat of the court imposed timetable, and other heat, and approved the plan.

Florida may not enjoy the same fate as Virginia because it did not sue in court for approval.  At a minimum, Florida will probably be burdened with more information requests, a range of questions which could otherwise only be obtained in discovery, and general hostility toward the Florida plan. 

I and others will be writing more shortly about the particular advantages that Virginia enjoyed by submitting their plan to district court, and the limits of bad behavior DOJ endured because the court supervised the issue, not bureaucrats.

Triparish Times: “The Terrebonne Parish Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People vows to file a federal suit seeking to have one seat on the 32nd Judicial District bench designated for minorities after a similar measure suffered defeat last Tuesday on the state House floor.”

Latest at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment: Taxpayer funded beer bash, ball games and scavenger hunt at DOJ.

Story here.

Miami Herald:

In the final weeks of the county mayoral race Hialeah firefighters are waging their own campaign — to educate residents about potential election fraud.

Teams of firefighters are knocking on doors and urging residents to take care of their absentee ballots in particular. They are handing out stamps to voters so that they can mail the ballots themselves.

“The message is protect the integrity of your vote,” said Mario Pico, the head of the Hialeah firefighters union, of the campaign.

The Hialeah firefighters launched their campaign in early June. Pico said the campaign was strictly nonpartisan and not political. The Metro-Dade Firefighters Local 1403 and Hialeah Association of Firefighters IAFF Local 1102 have endorsed Carlos Gimenez for county mayor. Gimenez was a fire chief in Miami before he was elected to the County Commission. Julio Robaina, the former Hialeah mayor, is also running for the top county job.

More on Dianna Duran’s referral of the serious voter roll problems to the New Mexico State Police for criminal investigation.

“New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran has identified what she says are 64,000 cases of possible voter fraud — a number that represents more than 10 percent of the people who voted in the 2010 general election in New Mexico.”

Yet what is the reaction to this potential problem from academia? 

“University of New Mexico political science professor Lonna Atkeson questioned why Duran didn’t first take the discrepancies to county clerks.”

Add this to the list of examples where public employees in the ivory tower not only don’t care about voter fraud, they seem intent on enabling it.  Why would Lonna Atkeson (photo above) oppose a criminal investigation of potential crimes?  Why does academia reflexively oppose election integrity efforts?

The sponsor of the Arizona immigration law, State Senator Russell Pearce, is facing a recall effort.  Before an election can be held, enough signatures must be gathered to put the issue to a vote.  Not surprisingly perhaps, the petitions have some curious names.  The Sonoran News:

Besides the normal findings of people signing who are not registered or registered in another district, there were some who signed who could not correctly spell their own name. That’s generally a red flag that something is amiss.

One man signed and printed his last name “Peterson” quite legibly. Due to Peterson being somewhat of a common name, it made more sense to look him up by address.

However, the address revealed the registration of a man whose last name was spelled “Pederson.”

Then there was the signature of a woman whose first name is Benita, living at 956 S. MacDonald.

Searching by address revealed three active voter registrations, one of which is on the permanent early voting list, for a woman with the first name Benita and a birth date in March 1968, under three different last names at the same single family residence.

“Eric Holder’s DOJ can’t investigate itself”

Houston Chronicle.  If Texas Democrats are confident DOJ will reject the redistricting plan, then Texas could bypass that risk by submitting the plan directly to federal court for approval.

What do reasonable lawyers do when an opposing attorney has a critically ill father during depositions?  My latest about what unreasonable lawyers do.

Human decency and professional courtesy would dictate that the lawyers merely reschedule the deposition. But King and Spalding instead filed a motion for monetary sanctions against Coates for being at his critically ill father’s bedside instead of attending a deposition!