Just to pick up on what happened in my neck of the woods out here in California. It turned out to be a great night. The tax revolt is dead, or at least not a binding religious totem, the way it was described here for the last 35 years. Prop 30, which temporarily raises income [...]

Close elections like this always expose the unseemly lack of competence in our federal elections, the main decisions of which are left up to partisan elected officials in the states. This Jon Husted guy in Ohio is starting to make past Republican Secretaries of State like Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell look like, well, the [...]

I’ve written previously about the Texas-based Tea Party group “True the Vote” involving themselves in voter suppression efforts in swing states. Some state laws allow any individual to challenge another’s voting status, and this has been put to use by True the Vote’s spinoff organizations in Ohio and at least three other states, to a [...]

Two items that have nothing to do with last night’s debate could end up having a greater impact on the Presidential race (or, at least, Democrats hope so). First, before the debate, when asked to elaborate on his new position that he would not cancel the deferred action status for DREAM-eligible immigrants, Mitt Romney added [...]

I’ve been watching the Nathan Sproul follies with some amusement. He’s the head of the company, Strategic Allied Consulting, that is accused of engaging in voter registration fraud in at least 9 Florida counties. I remember Sproul from my days covering California, where he ran the same type of games in the last decade, including [...]

When we last left the early voting tussle in Ohio, a federal judge ordered the state to open the polls on the weekend before the election. The Secretary of State, Jon Husted, planned to file an appeal. But he went further than that. He said that he would not institute the court order until after [...]

Viviette Applewhite, the 93 year-old who was one of the plaintiffs in the Pennsylvania voter ID case, received her ID card this week. Despite voting in practically every election since she became eligible, she didn’t have a driver’s license or Social Security card, and her birth certificate features a different name than the one on [...]

Amid the fallout from a Pennsylvania judge allowing the state’s voter ID law to advance, the Philadelphia Inquirer, um, inquires as to whether the law could affect the outcome of the Presidential election: Political strategists and experts in election law caution that it is difficult to predict the electoral impact of such laws in Pennsylvania [...]

The Florida voter purge list was a major topic at Netroots Nation 2012, with a high-profile panel moderated by The Nation’s Ari Berman. When we last left the story, the state’s election supervisors had shut down the purge, after the Department of Justice sent a letter warning that the purge violated at least two federal [...]

According to the Palm Beach Post, all 67 elections supervisors in Florida’s 67 counties have suspended the voter purge planned by the Governor, Rick Scott, and the Secretary of State’s office. The general counsel for the elections supervisors recommended a suspension after an order from the Justice Department to halt the voter purge, citing violations [...]

Florida Governor Rick Scott reacted to the Department of Justice’s demand to halt the voter purge lists that have the potential to disenfranchise thousands of legal voters in the state. Speaking to the Miami Herald, Scott denied that the state targeted minority voters in the purge, even though analyses of the purge lists have shown [...]