ThinkProgress filed this report from the Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Florida.

For the past year (and arguably long before that), conservatives have been working tirelessly to restrict access to the ballot box. In states from Ohio to Florida to Texas, Republican lawmakers have passed legislation to curb early voting and put onerous limits on voter registration drives.

Perhaps most prevalent, however, have been GOP attempts to implement photo ID laws. They have enjoyed success in seven states thus far, thanks in large part to model legislation from the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council.

Last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) proposed taking these restrictions a step further by voicing his support for a national voter ID law to require that all citizens provide photo identification at the polls, regardless of their state’s law.

ThinkProgress spoke with presidential candidate and former pizza executive Herman Cain about the proposal following Monday night’s debate in Florida. Cain, who regularly references his adherence to the Constitution on the stump, ignored the fact that elections are traditionally overseen by states and backed Graham’s proposal, calling it “something [he] could support.” Cain then went on to compare the right to vote with photo ID requirements to board an airplane:

KEYES: What do you make of Lindsey Graham’s call for a national voter ID law?

CAIN: I didn’t know he had called for a national voter ID law.

KEYES: Is that something you would support? Requiring all voters to have a photo ID at the polls?

CAIN: Now that sounds like something I could support, without looking at it in detail, and here’s why. If you need a picture to get on an airplane, why shouldn’t you need one in order to be able to vote?

REPORTER: What about students living on college campuses not in their hometown but voting where they’re living at now?

CAIN: […] I favor more honest elections, and if a picture ID helps to achieve that, I could go along with a picture ID.

Watch it:

Voting is not like getting on an airplane — flying is not the basis of our government’s legitimacy. Our country was built upon a foundation of “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” and that includes people who are unable to obtain a photo ID.

Cain’s support for a national voter ID law is just a small part of a larger right-wing campaign against voting rights, which Rolling Stone explored in depth:

Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP’s effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

Earlier this year, Newt Gingrich even floated the idea of reinstating the poll test – a Jim Crow law used for years to suppress minorities – as a prerequisite for voting. Similarly, voter ID laws have the potential to disenfranchise a staggering number of voters, especially minorities.

The former House speaker’s proposal was widely panned for its obvious discriminatory nature. Cain and Graham’s idea to have a national voter ID law ought to receive a similar fate.

Ever since the Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) published — and reiterated — that Social Security is an unconstitutional “Ponzi Scheme,” his campaign has struggled to walk Perry back from his own beliefs. The campaign continues to insist that Perry never said Social Security is unconstitutional despite video evidence proving them wrong.

Today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, fellow Republican Gov. Rick Scott (FL) struggled to figure out how Perry could even come to that conclusion, let alone repeat it. When host Joe Scarborough asked whether he agreed with Perry that Social Security is unconstitutional, Scott replied, “I don’t know how it would be”:

SCARBOROUGH: Rick Perry said it’s unconstitutional. Do you believe that Social Security is unconstitutional?

SCOTT: I don’t know how it would be unconstitutional. I just want to make sure that people that rely on Social Security, they get it.

Watch it:

His restraint is particularly surprising considering how many radically right-wing tendencies he shares with Perry. If even Rick Scott thinks your views of the Constitution are too wacky, it’s a pretty good sign that you’ve wandered so close to the right-wing ledge that you’re about to fall off.

Tim Murphy of Mother Jones begins his report on Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) juvenile detention record with an explosive question: “Why did the GOP presidential contender wait six years to clean up the culture of child rape at Texas youth detention centers?” Perry has known about the severe problems in the state’s juvenile detention system since 2001, but largely ignored them while taking campaign contributions from private prison lobbyists who had the most to gain from him looking the other way:

For years, the Texas juvenile justice system was wracked by reports of rape, unsanitary conditions, and physical abuse. According to statistics submitted by the TYC in 2007, 83 percent of residents who requested counseling that year were ultimately diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.[...]

Gov. Rick Perry did not take swift action to address the problem, which his office knew about for years. Allegations of systematic mistreatment at TYC facilities first came to the Governor’s desk in 2001, when then-Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) forwarded along a complaint that his office had received. That was six years before media coverage of the conditions in juvenile detention centers launched a public scandal. And critics of Perry, who is now a frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, point out that he received tens of thousands of dollars from lobbyists and executives for a firm tied to some of the worst abuses.

Perry sat on a growing pile of complaints for years and only took action when media reports sparked a national scandal — “and even then, some of the worst offenders got off easy.” In 2007, the Dallas Morning News and Texas Observer noted that the TYC had received, and failed to respond to, 750 complaints of sexual misconduct from inmates since 2000. One prison guard accused of sexual assault turned out to be a registered sex offender. Conditions and mistreatment at one youth detention facility in central Texas were so bad — “feces on the walls and bed-sheets, steel bars blocking fire escapes” — that it had to be shut down entirely.

The real victims of Perry’s inaction were, of course, thousands of young men and women, many of whom spent years at these facilities for non-violent offenses. Far from rehabilitating them, this hellish “justice” system turned into a “breeding ground for mental illness and a stepping stone to recidivism.”

Murphy also notes that the TYC Board of Supervisors, which was responsible for letting most of the complaints die, consists almost entirely of major GOP donors rather than qualified criminal justice professionals. Several of the facilities and guards that received complaints were operated or employed by GEO Group, one of the nation’s biggest private prison contractors.

At every step of the way, reform of the system was complicated by Perry’s financial entanglements with GEO Group and his support for prison privatization. As ThinkProgress has reported, the private prison industry has spent millions on lobbying to put more people in jail for longer sentences, which translates to more profits for them. Additionally, Perry took in $65,000 from GEO lobbyists and executives during his 2010 reelection campaign. As for GEO Group, they would receive nothing but a slap on the wrist for their abuses.

President Obama won Pennsylvania by more than 10 percentage points in 2008, and Democrats have won the state in every single presidential election for the last two decades. In a close election, it is difficult to draw an electoral map that sends a Democrat to the White House without that Democrat winning all of Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes. So the state’s GOP Gov. Tom Corbett has a simple plan — give away nearly half of the state’s electoral vote to the Republican presidential candidate for free:

Gov. Tom Corbett and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi are proposing that the state divide up its Electoral College votes according to which candidates carried each Congressional district, plus two votes for the statewide winner. The system is used by Maine — which, despite the system, has never actually split its four electoral votes — and by Nebraska, which gave one of its five votes to Barack Obama in 2008. [...]

Had this proposed system been in place in 2008, when Obama won the state by a ten-point margin, he in fact would have only taken 11 out of the state’s 21 electoral votes at the time — due to a combination of past Republican-led redistricting efforts to maximize their district strength, and Obama’s votes being especially concentrated within urban areas.

Let’s be clear, the Electoral College is a terrible idea. It has, on three occasions, allowed the loser of the national popular vote to enter the White House. It forces presidential candidates to pander to swing states and ignore the needs of the vast majority of the nation. Without the Electoral College, Bush v. Gore would never have happened and former President-elect Al Gore would have succeeded Bill Clinton. If the entire nation were to adopt Corbett’s plan of doling out electoral votes by congressional district, it would eliminate many of the problems caused by our current system.

But when a major blue state’s Republican leadership adopts this kind of reform piecemeal, it is nothing less than an attempt to rig the election. One hundred percent of Texas’ electoral votes will still go to the Republican, but that same Republican will be guaranteed a share of Pennsylvania’s historically blue electors under Corbett’s plan.

And Corbett’s electoral giveaway to the GOP is merely the most audacious prong of a nationwide GOP strategy to steal democracy away from the American people. Numerous GOP state legislatures rammed through “voter ID” laws, which disenfranchise thousands of elderly, disabled, and low-income voters. Other states have erected new barriers to voter registration or reduced early voting opportunities — both of which make it more difficult for working class Americans to vote. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) gutted his state’s public financing system for candidates to pay for a voter disenfranchisement law. A 5-4 Supreme Court decision just declared laws enabling publicly financed candidates to defend themselves against unlimited corporate attack ads unconstitutional.

Because in the GOP’s America, We the People can elect anyone we want, so long as they are a Republican.