The latest voter suppression tactic employed by Republicans can be found in Maine, where last week the Secretary of State sent a threatening letter to hundreds of college students who were legally registered to vote in Maine, floating the possibility of election law violation and encouraging them to re-register elsewhere.

The letter explained that Maine Secretary of State Charles Summers was writing because he “was presented with a list of 206 University of Maine students with out-of-state home addresses and asked to investigate allegations of election law violations.” That list was provided to him not by an uninterested citizen, but rather the Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster, who has accused these students of voter fraud.

In his letter, Summers informed the recipient that “our research shows you have registered to vote as a resident of Maine,” before going on to strongly imply that the students did not meet the state definition for “residence of a person”. Summers went on to encourage the students to re-register in another state, telling them that if “you are no longer claiming to be a Maine resident, I ask that you complete the enclosed form to cancel your voter registration in Maine.” Here is the relevant section of the letter:

Dear ______:

On July 25, 2001, I was presented with a list of 206 University of Maine students with out-of-state home addresses and asked to investigate allegations of election law violations.[...]

Our research shows you have registered to vote as a resident of Maine. Maine’s election law (Title 21-A of the Maine Revised Statutes, section 111, subsection 1) defines “residence of a person” as “that place where the person has established a fixed and principal home to which the person, whenever temporarily absent, intends to return.” [...]

If you are currently using an out-of-state driver’s license or motor vehicle registration, I ask that you take appropriate action to comply with out motor vehicle laws within the next 30 days (i.e. by October 20, 2011). If, instead, you are no longer claiming to be a Maine resident, I ask that you complete the enclosed form to cancel your voter registration in Maine so that out our central voter registration system can be updated.

The letter does not explicitly accuse the students of violating the state’s residency laws — and indeed it would be very difficult for Summers to defend such a claim. The Supreme Court ruled over 30 years ago that students cannot be held to a different residency standard than other people within the state. Nevertheless, the letter succeeded in intimidating many of its targets.

ThinkProgress spoke with a few of the letter recipients. Casey O’Malley, a senior at University of Maine Farmington, said her family has been worried about potential legal consequences because of this letter. She hasn’t decided whether to cancel her registration or not, but her family has been “pretty insistent” that she do so in order to be on the safe side. Another recipient, who wished to remain anonymous, said that students she knew were “beyond scared and freaked out.” One was “so shaken up” because she was scared the letter meant she was going to get sued.

Maine Secretary of State spokeswoman Caitlin Chamberlain told ThinkProgress that intimidating student voters “wasn’t our aim.” The office “just wanted to inform students who may not have been aware of those laws,” Chamberlain said. Though she said the office accepted the Supreme Court ruling permitting student voters, she also claimed that “to vote in Maine, you must declare yourself a resident.” This was reflected in the letter, leading many students to mistakenly believe that they were illegally registered in Maine.

For the Maine secretary of state to target hundreds of college students with scare tactics on the behest of the Maine Republican Party chairman is one of the worst forms of voter intimidation. Most citizens would be understandably frightened by such a letter, especially college students who were first-time voters. Though these Maine students were performing their civic duty, the same cannot be said for Summers and Webster.

There’s a word for top elections officials who decide not to help students to vote but rather harass them into un-registering: reprehensible.

American students do not know the basic history of the nation’s civil rights movement, and most of the blame for this lack of knowledge falls on states’ academic standards for public schools, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The report gave letter grades to states based on how well their state curriculum included the civil rights movement; in all, 35 states received an F. Alabama, Florida, and New York received an A, and eight of the 12 states that received an A, B, or C are southern states. “Generally speaking, the farther away from the South — and the smaller the African-American population — the less attention paid to the civil rights movement,” the report says.

But according to the New York Times, the SPLC report is just one of many that continue to show how few students are considered to be proficient in history:

Over the past decade, students have performed worse on federal history tests administered by the Department of Education than on tests in any other subject. On the history test last year, only 12 percent of high school seniors showed proficiency.

The law center’s report noted that on that federal test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, seniors were asked to read a brief excerpt from the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, including the phrase, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Only 2 percent of the seniors were able to state that the ruling had been prompted by a school segregation case.

While presidential candidate former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) has blamed these weak history scores on a left-wing conspiracy, ThinkProgress has documented how conservatives are manipulating history textbooks and state curriculum in order to push their ideological agenda — especially in Texas. The state’s Board of Education rewrote the requirements to remove Thomas Jefferson, take out mentions of civil rights leaders, and prevent “gross pro-Islamic, anti-Christian distortions” in its textbooks.

Sadly, Texas’ slanted curriculum could easily spread to infect other states. Because of the state’s size, textbook manufacturers gear their textbooks to match Texas’ requirements rather than have to produce multiple copies to match multiple curricula for all of the states. And if students across the nation are learning about just what the right-wing wants them to know, then the large number of states failing to teach students about the civil rights movement is not likely to improve.

In a transparent attempt to punish teachers for organizing union efforts, Michigan Republicans are pushing a bill through the legislature that would prohibit public employees from sending political messages through their work emails. The bill is an attempt to stifle any union-related communication between teachers and other public employees, imposing ridiculously harsh penalties for teachers who send “political” messages:

Michigan educators could face a year in prison for conducting union or political business over public school e-mail servers under a bill advancing in Lansing.

State House Bill 4052 was reported out of committee last week, and would prohibit a public employee from using public e-mail for political campaigning, union activities, union recruitment, and fundraising.

Violators could be found guilty of a misdemeanor, which would carry a fine of up to $1,000, up to one year in prison or both in the bill’s amended version. Organizations found guilty would face up to a $10,000 fine.[...]

The bill is an example of ongoing “classic scapegoating” in Lansing against teachers, and is being used to appeal to the Republican-led Legislature’s base, said Doug Norton, former Howell Education Association president.

“I think that they hate the fact that teachers are able to join a union and collectively bargain. I think they have targeted teachers in their organization,” Norton said.

The Michigan Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the state, says the bill is political retribution after a conservative activist lost a legal battle over the use of school districts’ email service for union lobbying efforts. The Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that teachers’ emails were not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which would’ve made all personal communications subject to public scrutiny.

Instead of abiding by the court’s decision, Michigan Republicans are determined to circumvent the law and crack down on unions by completely banning “political” communication by public employees. The Livingston Daily notes that the bill actually cannot be enforced without modifying the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

These so-called small government conservatives seem entirely comfortable with the prospect of a Big Brother police state that would monitor all communications by all public employees. Disturbingly, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Al Pscholka (R) said the law would depend on co-workers reporting violations by their colleagues, fostering an atmosphere of fear and suspicion and inviting public accusations based on personal vendettas.

The Michigan Education Association warns that this GOP assault is about more than public workers and their unions — if passed, it would weaken constitutional protections on every citizen’s right to freedom of speech and freedom of association.

Despite Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) belief that nearly the entire 20th Century violates the Constitution, much of the GOP have declared him an apostate for vigorously defending a bill he signed giving undocumented immigrant students in Texas the ability to pay in-state tuition to state universities. The latest Republican to jump on this bandwagon is Perry’s presidential rival Herman Cain, who told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer yesterday that he could not support Perry in large part because of Perry’s somewhat moderate stance on immigration:

Today I could not support Rick Perry as the nominee for a host of reasons. Him being soft on securing the border is one of the reasons. I feel very strongly about the need to secure the border for real, the need to enforce the laws that are already there, the need to promote the path to citizenship that is already there. But, more importantly, empower the states to enforce the national federal immigration laws, because the federal government didn’t do it, can’t do it and they never will do it.

Watch it:

Cain’s suggestion that immigration law enforcement should simply be turned over to the states is just another example of his naive understanding of both foreign policy and the Constitution.

As the Supreme Court established almost 70 years ago, the states have very little business weighing into immigration policy because “[e]xperience has shown that international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs to another’s subjects inflicted, or permitted, by a government.” If a single state mangles an immigration prosecution, for example, or directs disparate resources against the citizens of one nationality, it will impact the foreign relations of the entire United States — potentially even thrusting America into a needless war. The Constitution leaves these kinds of decisions up to a leader who has actually been elected by the whole nation, and not to the governor of just one state.

Nevertheless, Cain’s weak understanding of law and policy is apparently quite appealing to the kind of voters who cheer death and boo U.S. servicemembers. A new Fox News poll shows previous frontrunner Rick Perry hemorrhaging support — more than one third of his previous supporters ditched his candidacy in the wake of Perry’s defense of humane treatment for immigrants — while Cain has surged 11 points to third place in the GOP primary.