Mitt Romney’s new ad, “War On Coal,” accuses President Obama of “ruining the coal industry” and putting coal miners out of work. It also showcases footage of Romney speaking at a rally at an Ohio coal mine, flanked by solemn-looking miners.

Those miners, however, are not Romney supporters. In fact, they later said they were forced to attend the rally without pay. Now that the footage has been used in a campaign ad, the political advocacy group Progress Ohio has filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission accusing the owner of Murray Energy Corporation of an illegal corporate contribution in the form of his employees.

Watch it:

The ad is running in the coal towns of Steubenville, Ohio and Wheeling and Parkersburg, West Virginia. Progress Ohio’s Brian Rothenberg said he would be “open” to dropping the complaint if the campaign pulls the ad or edits the miners out of it. When asked about the complaint, a Romney campaign spokesman told the Columbus Dispatch:

It remains a widely accepted fact by Democrats and Republicans alike that President Obama has spent the past four years waging a war on coal that has devastated middle class families and coal communities across the Midwest. These gimmicks by Barack Obama’s left-wing allies are nothing more than an ineffective and pathetic attempt to distract voters away from that reality.

Romney’s ads have often raised concerns of dishonesty. In his very first campaign ad against Obama, he attributed the line, “If we talk about the economy, we’re going to lose,” to Obama though he was actually mimicking the McCain campaign in 2008. Romney was also widely condemned for a blatantly false ad about Obama’s welfare reforms.

Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) Senate campaign has struggled to rebound after his claim that women could not get pregnant from “legitimate rape” led to a drop in fundraising and GOP establishment support. A new recording released by his opponent, Democratic incumbent Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), won’t do much to help him. In the recording, taken in May, Akin suggests that the best way to get his attention is to make a donation to his campaign.

An unidentified man asks Akin for advice on the best way to get in touch with a congressman, asking “should we write them a letter?” Akin dismissed the idea and suggested cash might be more attention-grabbing:

AKIN: I’m in a three-way primary for the US Senate. I’ve gone to people and asked for their support, their help, or their endorsement, and some people say yes. They write me a decent check. I remember that. The people that I thought were friends that tell me to go away because they are supporting someone else, I remember that. You know, I can remember back to 12 years ago. You remember who’s helping you. That’s one way that people get to know congressmen and senators.

Listen:

The telling exchange was recorded by a member of the Missouri Democratic Party. Akin has been scrambling for “decent checks.” On Friday, he reportedly agreed to support an earmark ban in the Senate favored by the Senate Conservatives Fund in exchange for the super PAC’s fundraising help. Akin’s last chance to drop out of the race will expire Tuesday.

Republican election officials have been unable to find even scant evidence of voter fraud. In voter purges in Colorado and Florida, targeting mostly Democrat and independent registered voters, officials uncovered that less than one-tenth of 1 percent of voters are potentially unqualified to vote. These findings drastically downgrade Republican fears of voter fraud from the tens of thousands of noncitizens officials originally estimated. The Associated Press reports:

Last year, [Colorado Secretary of State Scott] Gessler estimated that 11,805 noncitizens were on the rolls. But the number kept getting smaller.

After his office sent letters to 3,903 registered voters questioning their status, the number of noncitizens now stands at 141, based on checks using a federal immigration database. Of those 141, Gessler said 35 have voted in the past. The 141 are .004 percent of the state’s nearly 3.5 million voters. Even those numbers could be fewer.

Officials in Florida found 207 noncitizens on its voter list, .001 percent of the state’s voters, but they did not necessarily commit fraud. Florida’s purge discovered just one Canadian who illegally voted. In North Carolina, hundreds of voters have received letters requesting proof they were citizens, but an elections board member acknowledged there were just 12 instances of noncitizen voting. Iowa has filed charges against three noncitizen voters.

Unfortunately, voter supression tactics could disenfranchise millions of low-income and minority voters, including 10 million Hispanics.

On Monday, Mitt Romney offered a remedy to the problem that caused his wife’s airplane to land prematurely last week: Allow passengers to roll down the airplane windows.

Ann Romney’s plane was grounded Friday after the main cabin filled with smoke. The small electrical fire caused no injuries, but apparently did cause the Presidential candidate to forget the dangers of altitude.

“When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly,” he told the LA Times. “And you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem.”

Air crafts do not open windows because the cabins are pressurized to fly safely at an altitude of tens of thousand feet. Opening a window in an airplane would seriously sicken the passengers and crew.

On Sunday, Mitt Romney told reporters on his campaign plane that while he wishes he could spend more time in swing states, he has had to focus on fundraising because President Obama has raised so much money. Though Romney has consistently opted-out of the obsolete presidential public financing — and his own vice presidential nominee repeatedly voted to kill it — he blamed Obama’s unwillingness to abide by its limits.

ROMNEY: I’d far rather be spending my time out in the key swing states campaigning, door-to-door if necessary, but at rallies and various meetings. But fundraising is a part of politics when your opponent decides not to live by the federal spending limits.

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In a January Republican primary debate, Romney called for repeal of all campaign limits, saying “Wouldn’t it be nice if people could give what they’d like to to campaigns and campaigns could run their own ads and take responsibility for them?”

The federal public financing system for presidential elections was enacted in the 1970s and provided matching funds for primary candidates and a grant for general election candidates — as long as their campaigns agreed to live by strict spending limits. The grant for the general election would be about $91 million for 2012 — well below what it would cost to keep up with outside super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups are spending on the race in the post-Citizens United era.

Only candidates who “opt-in” to the public grant are required to adhere to limits, making Romney’s claim misleading. Like President Obama, Romney opted-out of accepting the limits for both his 2008 and 2012 primary campaigns and for the general election. 2008 Republican nominee John McCain said in 2009 that the public financing system was “dead,” noting that “no Republican in his or her right mind is going to agree to public financing.” 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry encouraged Obama to opt-out of the system to avoid his own fate.
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A new study by the Advancement Project estimates that voter purges and ID requirements being enacted in over 20 states could disenfranchise at least 10 million Hispanic citizens. The analysis found about 6.3 million Hispanic citizens were not registered to vote in 2010, while 10.8 million, about half the voting bloc, said they did not vote. The number is bound to swell as new efforts to limit the vote in states with large Latino communities use outdated information to remove suspected noncitizens:

Those states are home to nearly 5.5 million registered Latino voters, and 1.1 million naturalized citizens from Latin America. Colorado and Florida identified voters for possible purging by comparing their voter registrations with driver’s license databases that show which voters indicated they were immigrants – thereby creating a problem, the report said.

“Naturalized citizens typically received their driver’s licenses when they were legal immigrants but before becoming naturalized citizens (and before registering to vote); therefore, this method generates lists of voters to be checked that targets naturalized citizens,” the report said.

Colorado has since called off its voter purge, but not before sending semi-threatening letters to suspected non-citizens telling them they needed to prove their citizenship. Florida has restarted a new purge with impossible deadlines for voters to prove their citizenship.

Voter ID laws throw up more obstacles, as many naturalized citizens will now be asked for additional paperwork to prove their eligibility, a requirement researchers called “onerous and sometimes expensive.”

Both presidential candidates have been fighting for Hispanic votes, making their case at the Univision forum in Florida last week. But Mitt Romney, considered the most anti-immigrant candidate during the Republican primary, has had trouble winning over Hispanics, who are overwhelmingly in favor of Obama. In order to win the election without picking up any minority votes, Romney would need to carry 61 percent of white voters to make up for this crucial demographic.