Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus made a curious claim on MSNBC today, alleging that Wisconsin is a state “that was absolutely riddled with voter fraud.”

The problem? A recent study by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice found just seven cases of voter fraud out of three million votes cast in Wisconsin during the 2004 election, a fraud rate of 0.0002 percent. All seven of these cases involved persons with felony convictions who weren’t eligible to vote after being released from prison.

Unfazed by the minuscule incidence of actual voter fraud – comedian Stephen Colbert joked that “our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere” – Priebus went on MSNBC to defend Wisconsin’s new photo ID requirement and yesterday’s anti-voting rights measure passed by the House GOP. When host Martin Bashir pushed the RNC Chair about his party’s motivations for restricting voting rights, Priebus pointed to his home state of Wisconsin and declared, “I come from a state in Wisconsin that was absolutely riddled with voter fraud, okay?”

BASHIR: Just last night Republicans in the House voted to dismantle the Election Assistance Commission, the sole purpose of which is to make sure states meet voting standards that prevent fraud. Why would Republicans do that if they’re honestly concerned about preventing fraud? [...]

PRIEBUS: Well listen, I don’t want to get into the specifics here, but let me tell you something. I come from a state in Wisconsin that was absolutely riddled with voter fraud, okay? They had the smokes-for-votes exchange in Milwaukee. This is something that has nothing to do with constitutional rights of the people who are committing the fraud, it has to do with the constitutional rights of people under our Constitution that one person gets one vote, not two or three or four or five, by not having reasonable voting standards in this country to make sure that fraud doesn’t occur.

Watch it:

Research has found that voters are 39 times more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud at the polls, and 3,500 times more likely to report a UFO encounter.

Voter fraud certainly ought to be prosecuted in the extremely rare instances when it occurs. But Republicans like Priebus are using the false specter of fraud as a cudgel to disenfranchise millions.

A custody fight in Georgia is illustrating the biases of a foster care system that some say routinely subverts the parental rights of undocumented and non-English speaking mothers and fathers:

Ovidio and Domitina Mendez’s lost their five children to foster care when the Georgia Department of Family and Children Services arrived at their home claimed the kids were malnourished. The couple, who are both undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, says they did everything the child welfare agency asked them to do to get their kids back. But three years later, the children are still in foster care with strangers. Why? Because they are undocumented immigrants who speak Spanish, according to advocates.

A recent study by the Applied Research Center revealed that at least 5,100 children are languishing in America’s foster care system because their immigrant parents were detained or deported. But the report also found that even when undocumented parents are not detained or deported, they face bias in the child welfare system as a result of cultural and language discrimination.

For instance, at the June hearing that terminated the Mendez’s parental rights, they were peppered with seemingly irrelevant questions about their English-speaking ability and immigration status. “Describe for the court why even three years after [the children went into the state’s custody] you cannot speak English without an interpreter,” asked Bruce Kling, special assistant attorney general for Whitfield County Department of Family and Children’s Service.

The state also argued that the Mendezes’ should not regain custody because, as undocumented immigrants, they could not attain driver’s licenses and therefore couldn’t transport their children. ARC found that many county child welfare departments give this justification for why undocumented parents can’t be trusted as caregivers.

The suggestion that undocumented immigrants are unfit parents (usually for reasons related to their poverty) is often used to separate them from their children. But children then remain in foster care because of the barriers that undocumented mothers and fathers face in trying to regain custody. Parents’ undocumented status also works against them by preventing them from accessing state services that would enable them to better provide for their children.

Alabama officials announced Thursday that every sworn police officer in Alabama — all 16,000 of them — will go through four hours of mandatory training about how to enforce HB 56, the state’s draconian anti-immigrant law. The law has caused confusion across the state, said Alan Benefield, head of the Alabama Police Officers’ Standards and Training Commission, and ongoing legal challenges complicate the situation further. One of the first people arrested under the law turned out to be a legal immigrant, and two employees of foreign carmakers in the state have been arrested even though they were in the state legally.

The AP reviewed the training materials:

Training materials from the course, provided to The Associated Press by Benefield, emphasize that only the federal government has the power to determine whether someone is in the country legally, but that police agencies and administrators can be sued under the state law for failing to enforce either it or federal immigration statutes.

A course handout explains how officers should operate under the state statute — profiling based on race, color or national origin is barred — and says the law “does not authorize state, county and municipal agencies to seek out ‘illegals’ for deportation.”

Enforcement of the new law isn’t supposed to interfere with other police work. “This law doesn’t change the focus or priority of your agency,” the materials state.

The training will continue into January. Benefield told the AP that the training could not happen sooner because the commission had to sort through all of the court rulings regarding the law to understand what they were working with.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), using information gathered from internal Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) documents, is alleging that the FBI is illegally gathering information on Muslims’ political and religious affiliations during outreach meetings.

Particularly since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the FBI has been conducting outreach with American Muslims and Arab Americans, working with them to increase cooperation between communities and federal authorities. Yet the documents obtained by the ACLU show that the FBI has been using this outreach to spy on Muslim communities that are working with the federal government.

As one example, FBI agents are “recording Social Security numbers and other identifying information of people they meet,” and one agent in California even recorded the political views of the attendees of a Ramadan dinner, noting that one was “very progressive” and another was “very Western in appearance and outlook“:

Some of the papers show agents speaking at career days, briefing community members on FBI programs and helping them work with police to fight drug abuse. But the files also depict agents as recording Social Security numbers and other identifying information of people after they meet, and, in at least one instance, noting their political views. It appears that the agents are conducting follow-up investigations in some instances, but heavy redactions in the documents make it impossible to determine how far any examination might have gone.

In one case, an agent wrote that he checked California motor vehicle records on someone the agent encountered at a Ramadan dinner at a San Francisco Islamic association. One attendee is described as “very progressive.” Another is called “very Western in appearance and outlook.”

The ACLU alleges that this spying is actually illegal. It’s disconcerting that the FBI is engaging in illegal spying, and it is also troubling that the FBI is betraying the trust of the very American Muslims who have chosen to cooperate with the federal government in its goal of identifying and preventing domestic radicalization.

“The allegations themselves are extremely damaging to the partnership,” said the Muslim Public Affair Committee’s Alejandro J. Beutel to Talking Points Memo. “Whether or not we’re talking about whether this is deliberate or accidental, we really need to hear some immediate clarification from officials at the FBI because it really seems like the partnership — which has been very important to keeping our nation safe and secure — has come under enormous strain, especially in the past few months.”