ThinkProgress filed this report from the Values Voters bus tour in Waukee, Iowa.

Portions of the nation’s most harmful immigration law went into effect last month in Alabama, causing widespread fear and panic among the state’s Latino population. It requires school officials to verify students’ immigration status, prompting thousands of frightened Latino students not to show up for school. The new law even makes it a felony for utility companies to provide water in undocumented immigrants’ homes.

ThinkProgress spoke with one of the leading anti-immigration voices in the House GOP, Rep. Steve King (R-IA), yesterday in Iowa to get his take on Alabama’s law. King brushed aside concern that the law may go too far, arguing instead that police officers ought to “see somebody on the street and say, ‘Why are you here? What are you doing? Who are you? I don’t know who you are.’” When we asked whether forcing hospital patients to prove their immigration status would cross the line, King disagreed, stating, “I don’t know why that would be too far.”

KEYES: Do you think that Alabama went too far in terms of asking schoolchildren their immigration status or having utility companies be able to shut off water to families if they don’t provide their immigration status?

KING: [...] Going too far to ask someone about their status? Whether they can be legally or illegally in the United States? Not in the world I grew up in. In the world I grew up in, a police officer would see somebody on the street and say, “Why are you here? What are you doing? Who are you? I don’t know who you are.” [...]

KEYES: Is there anything you think that could be too far, like asking people in the hospital about their immigration status?

KING: I don’t know why that would be too far. It depends on who is doing the asking. But I have walked through the hospitals down along the border, and I know what goes on. Tucson University Hospital, for example, is the most southerly trauma center in Arizona. The reason for that is all the rest of them had to close because they’ve been required to provide free medical care to people who are in the United States illegally.

Watch it:

In his eight years in Congress, King has amassed a long record of castigating immigrants and Latinos in general. Last year, he declared that Rep. Raúl Grijalva’s (D-AZ) southern Arizona district may have been “ceded…to Mexico.” Prior to that, King called immigration a “slow-motion Holocaust.” And while discussing a border fence on the House floor in 2006, King proposed electrifying it, noting that “we do this with livestock all the time.”

As of now, Texas leads the nation with 476 executions since 1976. And with 12 executions recorded in this year alone, Texas looks to carry out the 13th against 49-year-old Henry “Hank” Skinner. Skinner was sentenced to death for the murders of his girlfriend and her two developmentally challenged sons in 1993. He insists, however, that he is innocent and that there is DNA evidence that could exculpate him. Forty-five minutes before his execution last year, the Supreme Court stayed his execution and said the inmate has “a basic civil right to press for DNA analysis.”

Numerous Texas officials including former Gov. Mark White (D) requested that Gov. Rick Perry (R) and the state of Texas ensure that the evidence, adding in a letter dated Oct. 27 that “executive Mr. Skinner without testing all the relevant evidence would suggest official indifference to the possibility of error in this case and needlessly undermine public confidence in Texas’s criminal justice system.” But last Thursday, a Texas court denied Skinner’s motion:

“We are deeply disappointed that the trial court has denied Mr. Skinner’s request for DNA testing,” Rob Owen, Skinner’s attorney, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the trial court’s order offers no explanation for its conclusion that DNA testing is not called for in this case.”

The case will now go to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Owen said, adding that he is confident the court will give the case “deliberate consideration. … We are confident that upon such careful review, the court will conclude that DNA testing is necessary in this case to ensure the reliability of the verdict.

“But for now, the Court of Criminal Appeals must stop the scheduled November 9 execution rather than allow itself to be rushed to a hasty and ill-considered decision,” Owen said. “The stakes in this case are too high to allow Mr. Skinner to be executed before he has a fair chance to make his case that the trial court made a grave mistake in denying his request for DNA testing.”

The Supreme Court voted 6-3 last year to back Skinner’s “basic civil right to press for DNA analysis.” However, a year earlier, the High Court ruled in a 5-4 decision to bar Alaska’s death row inmate William Osborne from testing DNA evidence to prove or disprove his innocence because Chief Justice Roberts somehow “determined that Osborne has no right to pay for a test that could exonerate him for a crime he did not commit.” The ridiculousness of this ruling did not escape Justice Stevens who wrote in his dissent, “for reasons the State has been unable or unwilling to articulate, it refuses to allow Osborne to test the evidence at his own expense and to thereby ascertain the truth once and for all.”

Incidentally, the Texas court that denied Skinner’s request also failed to offer any reasons as to why, and Owen is asking the Appeals Court to insist that they do. What’s more, Texas state attorneys are using Roberts’ reasoning to argue that “testing should not be conducted because there was not a reasonable probability that the trial jury would have found Skinner innocent if the testing had been done for his trial,” pointing to witness statements that point to him as the killer. Some of that witness testimony, however, has since been recanted.

As his attorney noted, the state plans to execute Skinner this Wednesday.

Although news broke last week that several women accused presidential candidate Herman Cain of sexual harassment in the 1990s, the details of Cain’s alleged actions have been thin. Today, that changed. In a press conference this afternoon, a woman who sought advice from Cain on how she could get a job claims that Cain sexually abused her during their encounter:

Instead of going into the offices, he suddenly reached over and he put his hand on my leg under my skirt and reached for my genitals. He also grabbed my head and brought it toward his crotch. I was very, very surprised and very shocked. I said, what are you doing? You know I have a boyfriend. This isn’t what I came here for. Mr. Cain said, you want a job, right?

Watch it:

Now, let’s be clear, these allegations are unproven and Herman Cain is entitled to the same presumption of innocence that anyone accused of a crime has a right to. But Cain has now been accused of a crime. Cain’s alleged actions occurred in the District of Columbia, where the law provides that “[w]hoever engages in a sexual act or sexual contact with another person and who should have knowledge or reason to know that the act was committed without that other person’s permission, shall be imprisoned for not more than 180 days and, in addition, may be fined in an amount not to exceed $1,000.”

These allegations also up the ante considerably for the many, many Republicans who raced to defend Cain last week by denying that sexual harassment is even a real problem. (They are wrong. One in 10 women in the workplace will at some point be “promised promotion or better treatment if they [are] ‘sexually cooperative’” with a co-worker or supervisor.) Yet even the GOP’s most rabid deniers of sexism will have a tough time arguing that there is nothing wrong with grabbing a person’s genitals against their will or trying to physically push them to perform oral sex on you.

In state after state, conservative officials are waging a war on voting by enacting laws that serve no purpose other than to make it harder for people to participate in our democracy. These include everything from “voter ID” laws that disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of student, minority and low-income voters, to laws attacking early voting, to laws making it harder to register to vote, to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett’s (R) shockingly audacious plan to rig the Electoral College to prevent President Obama from winning in 2012.

This war on voting has not gone unchallenged — 196 House members, for example, wrote to state elections officials last week urging them to “put partisan considerations aside and serve as advocates for enfranchisement” — but merely fighting to block the most audacious vote suppressing effort since Jim Crow is not enough. If Americans who actually believe in democracy do nothing more than play defense, the inevitable trend will be towards greater and greater disenfranchisement.

Which is why two bills introduced by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) last week are so important. The first, dubbed the “Voter Access Protection Act of 2011,” provides that “a State or local election official may not…require an individual to present a photo identification…as a condition of obtaining or casting a ballot in an election for Federal office,” thus restoring voting rights to the many thousands of people disenfranchised by voter ID laws. The second bill, the ‘‘Same Day Registration Act’’ does exactly what the name of the bill would suggest:

[E]ach State shall permit any eligible individual on the day of a Federal election and on any day when voting, including early voting, is permitted for a Federal election—

(A) to register to vote in such election at the polling place using a form that meets the requirements under section 9(b) of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993; and

(B) to cast a vote in such election.

It is unlikely that these bills will pass given the Congress’ current makeup, but Ellison still deserves a great deal of praise for introducing them. They send an important message that democracy cannot be defended simply by pushing back against laws that would thwart it — it must be aggressively expanded by laws that make it easier for American’s to participate in elections. Moreover, while these bills are likely to die in the federal legislature during the 112th Congress, there is no reason why states cannot follow Ellison’s lead by enacting same-day registration on their own and by passing state constitutional amendments protecting the right to vote.

This is the fifth installment in an ongoing series on voting rights leading up to Election Day 2011.

Tomorrow, the war on voting rights will descend on Maine as voters determine the fate of their state’s 38 year-old election day voter registration law.

The highly-anticipated vote could set the tone for 2012 as Republicans continue to push legislation that would hinder people’s ability to vote, including photo ID laws, shortened early voting periods, and even new restrictions on registering.

ThinkProgress traveled around Maine last week to get voters’ thoughts about the upcoming referendum. Across the state, voters were outraged that their voting rights were being stripped away by the legislature, potentially resulting in the disenfranchisement of thousands of Mainers. With just two cases of voter fraud in the past 38 years, many were livid that “electoral integrity” was being used as a red herring rationale for rolling back their right to register at the polls.

Watch a short video of Mainers expressing in their own words what election day registration has meant to them and why they want to preserve the law:

Question 1 remains a tight race. As ThinkProgress reported last week, a secret conservative donor has funneled over $250,000 into the state in an effort to get rid of election day registration. In an inexpensive media market like Maine, that money could go a long way to tip the scales in an off-year election.

Still, if Mainers are able to beat back the influence of large, undisclosed donations and pass Question 1, they will have struck a major blow to the GOP effort to restrict voting rights.

Tomorrow, Arizona voters will decide whether to oust their exceptionally right-wing state Senate president, Rep. Russell Pearce (R). The author of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law SB1070 who threatened to lock up protesters in “desert tent cities” is facing backlash for his extremism and now must run against fellow Republican Jerry Lewis in a recall election. To ensure his reelection, Pearce’s Tea Party supporters first recruited sham candidate Olivia Cortez to split the Hispanic vote, and now they’ve launched a deceptive robocall to Hispanic voters with the purpose of discouraging votes for his opponent, Lewis:

[L]atino families living in Mesa’s 18th legislative district tell ABC15 prerecorded audio messages are calling their phones. A man with a Spanish accent says:

“Voters beware. If you plan to vote this Tuesday, you should know that both candidates for State Senator, Russell Pearce and Jerry Lewis, are Republicans. The only other candidate, Olivia Cortez was forced to withdraw last month. You can protest this one-sided election by writing in your own candidate.”

Critics say the message is targeting Latino voters to convince them not to vote for Jerry Lewis, since most would not vote for Pearce anyway.

Watch ABC15′s report:

Pearce’s Tea Party supporter Ron Ludders, who commissioned the message, insists that “this is an educational situation, totally” and that “there’s nothing sinister about this.” Local Latinos like Gloria Chavez, however, say the call is “purposefully trying to mislead voters, and that should be illegal.” Though the Pearce campaign says it did not approve the message, Arizona’s Secretary of State will look into allegations of deceptions and “will take quick actions” if there’s enough evidence to support the charge.