The rise of e-commerce has created a new challenge for law enforcement officials as an increasing number of guns are sold online, potentially avoiding regulations like background checks for buyers or licenses for sellers. To determine if private sellers advertising guns for sale on the internet are complying with federal law by refusing to sell to people who could not pass a background check, New York City officials launched an undercover investigation of private online gun sales.

The results? The investigation’s report showed that the private gun sale loophole and private sector failures lets too many “unscrupulous individuals” sell guns online and “too many dangerous people” buy them.

The New York City report showed that 62 percent of private gun sellers agreed to sell a gun to a person who said he probably couldn’t pass a background check even though private sellers are prohibited from selling to prohibited purchasers, including those who indicate that they probably couldn’t pass a background check. Here are the failure rates of websites included in the New York investigation:

The report’s authors had these recommendations for how to stop illegal gun sales happening online:

• Federal law should require a background check for every gun sale. Legislation now pending in both chambers of Congress – The Fix Gun Checks Act of 2011 (S.436/H.R.1781 (112th Congress)) – would enact this reform.
• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) should improve enforcement of existing laws. ATF should conduct undercover investigations on a variety of websites, track whether guns recovered in crimes were originally sold online and offer online tutorials to train sellers and buyers on federal gun laws governing online sales.
• Websites should adopt tougher protocols to deter crime. Websites that permit gun sales should demand transparency from sellers and buyers, facilitate reporting of suspicious behavior by site users and swiftly remove prohibited listings.

Following the report, a national bipartisan coalition of mayors launched a campaign urging websites that host online gun advertisements to take steps to reduce illegal firearms sales. But if the websites do not willingly change their practices to help stop illegal gun sales, it is uncertain if there would be support for legislation to force changes because of the National Rifle Association’s fierce opposition to any changes to gun control laws. The group even refused to support closing the private gun sales loophole that does not require background checks after al Qaeda encouraged sympathizers to use it, so why would they support changes to online private sales?

This post is the third in a three-part series on last night’s voting rights speech by Attorney General Eric Holder. Part I is here. Part II is here.

Easily the boldest — and one of the most needed — idea in Attorney General Holder’s voting rights speech last night is a proposal to modernize our voter registration system to make it easier for every American to participate in democracy:

Today, the single biggest barrier to voting in this country is our antiquated registration system. According to the Census Bureau, of the 75 million adult citizens who failed to vote in the last presidential election, 60 million of them were not registered and, therefore, not eligible to cast a ballot.

All eligible citizens can and should be automatically registered to vote. The ability to vote is a right — it is not a privilege. Under our current system, many voters must follow cumbersome and needlessly complex voter registration rules. And every election season, state and local officials have to manually process a crush of new applications – most of them handwritten – leaving the system riddled with errors, and, too often, creating chaos at the polls.

Fortunately, modern technology provides a straightforward fix for these problems – if we have the political will to bring our election systems into the 21st century. It should be the government’s responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling – from databases that already exist – a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction. Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections – and would protect essential privacy rights.

Sadly, this basic and obvious point — that the franchise should not depend on whether a voter jumped through the right administrative hoop or whether a voting official misplaced their paperwork — is itself a point of stark contract between the Obama Administration and many of his conservative antagonists. As Holder is considering common sense ways to make our democracy function better, conservative lawmakers throughout the country are pushing laws making it harder and harder to register to vote.

In their zeal to crack down on undocumented immigrants, federal immigration officials have accidentally arrested and tried to deport thousands of U.S. citizens in the past year alone. Americans who find themselves in this nightmarish situation say their protests to the police fall on deaf ears, and they are denied any opportunity to communicate with immigration agents to clarify the situation.

Some citizens are held for a few days while the situation is resolved, but others have been locked in prison for months. Take the case of Anthony A. Clarke, a Minneapolis man who was arrested and illegally detained for 43 days while federal agents tried to deport him:

Clarke’s case is the apparent fallout of an aggressive ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] campaign to deport illegal immigrants who also have criminal records that show up during cross-checks of federal databases.

While those efforts have resulted in the deportation of hundreds of thousands of dangerous criminals, thousands of U.S. citizens have been snagged along the way, in part because agents operate in a secretive judicial environment where detention hearings are held out of public view.

After a detailed examination of federal immigration records, Prof. Jacqueline Stevens of Northwestern University estimated this year that about 4,000 American citizens were illegally detained or deported as aliens in 2010. In a study published last summer, she found that as many as 20,000 citizens may have been wrongly held or deported since 2003.

FBI records show that immigration agents were aware of Clarke’s legal status at the time he was arrested, and detained him anyway. The New York Times notes that “Any case where an American is held, even briefly, for immigration investigation is a potential wrongful arrest because immigration agents lack legal authority to detain citizens.” Clarke has filed a lawsuit in federal court.

In another horrifying case, a mentally-disabled citizen was actually deported and sent to prisons in Honduras and Guatemala before he was finally able to convince authorities there that he was an American.

The reason for the rising number of mistaken arrests appears to be ICE’s rapid expansion of Secure Communities, a deportation program, which has ballooned under President Obama and is widely criticized for eroding the trust between local police and immigrant communities and making it less likely that people will report crimes. Under the program, the fingerprints of every person booked at local jails are checked against Department of Homeland Security immigration databases. But the database is riddled with errors and routinely flags citizens as undocumented immigrants.

The administration’s harsh enforcement practices have resulted in 1.1 million deportations since the beginning of President Obama’s term, the highest numbers in six decades.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune observes that these stories “raise disturbing questions about the tactics of immigration agents and the adequacy of checks and balances in a parallel court system overseeing the…ICE agency.”

This post is the second in a three-part series on last night’s voting rights speech by Attorney General Eric Holder. Part I is here.

Republicans justify their vote suppressing “voter ID” laws by raising imagined fears of in person voter fraud. In their mythology, armies of votes arrive at the polls every year to stuff the ballot box with extra ballots cast under false names. In truth, of course, a voter is 39 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to actually commit fraud at the polls.

Yet, as Attorney General Holder explained in last night’s speech, this does not mean that election fraud is entirely a myth. Another, much more virulent form infects American democracy:

Over the years, we’ve seen all sorts of attempts to gain partisan advantage by keeping people away from the polls – from literacy tests and poll taxes, to misinformation campaigns telling people that Election Day has been moved, or that only one adult per household can cast a ballot. Before the 2004 elections, fliers were distributed in minority neighborhoods in Milwaukee, falsely claiming that “[I]f anybody in your family has ever been found guilty [of a crime], you can’t vote in the presidential election” – and you risk a 10-year prison sentence if you do. Two years later, 14,000 Latino voters in Orange County, California, received mailings, warning in Spanish that, “[If] you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that can result in jail time.” Both of these blatant falsehoods likely deterred some eligible citizens from going to the polls.

And, just last week, the campaign manager of a Maryland gubernatorial candidate was convicted on election fraud charges for approving anonymous “robocalls” that went out on Election Day last year to more than 100,000 voters in the state’s two largest majority-black jurisdictions. These calls encouraged voters to stay home – telling them to “relax” because their preferred candidate had already wrapped up a victory.

To his credit, Holder’s boss, President Obama, has a long history of fighting against these very real forms of election fraud. In 2006, Maryland gubernatorial and Republican Senate candidates Bob Ehrlich and Michael Steele hired hundreds of people to pass out misleading flyers in African-American precincts which falsely suggested that Ehrlich and Steele were actually Democrats and that they were endorsed by three leading black politicians. Then-Senator Obama responded by joining with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to introduce the Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act of 2007. One of the big pieces of news in Holder’s speech last night is that this bill is making a come back:

In an effort to deter and punish such harmful practices, during his first year in the U.S. Senate, President Obama introduced legislation that would establish tough criminal penalties for those who engage in fraudulent voting practices – and would help to ensure that citizens have complete and accurate information about where and when to vote. Unfortunately, this proposal did not move forward. But I’m pleased to announce that – tomorrow – Senators Charles Schumer and Ben Cardin will re-introduce this legislation, in an even stronger form. I applaud their leadership – and I look forward to working with them as Congress considers this important legislation.

This is excellent news. It is not enough for supporters of voting rights to combat anti-voter laws by simply trying to keep them from passing. Protecting the right to vote means playing offense, and that means passing new legislation designed to protect each voter’s most important civil right. Moreover, while Cardin & Schumer’s legislation is unlikely to pass so long as John Boehner is Speaker, there is no reason why similar legislation cannot be taken up by state lawmakers who share their concern for American democracy.

This post is the first in a three-part series on last night’s voting rights speech by Attorney General Eric Holder

Last night, Attorney General Eric Holder traveled to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library to give the most comprehensive explanation of the Obama Administration’s voting rights policy to date. The venue was certainly well chosen. Sixty years ago, when Holder was born, southern men who shared his skin color enjoyed no real access to the ballot box. Today, Holder himself is the chief guardian of America’s voting rights. In the America Holder grew up in, men and women faced fire hoses, endured beatings, bled under the blows of billy clubs wrapped in barb wire and spent night after night in jail as part of a decades long struggle to cast a vote. A few decades later, many of those same veterans of peaceful protest marched into the polling booth and elected Barack Obama president. What changed between now and then was the Voting Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson’s signature accomplishment and probably the most important civil rights law in American history.

Yet, as Holder explained, the very voting rights that he is now charged with enforcing are endangered by an all-too-common pattern of voter suppression laws in the states:

As Congressman John Lewis described it, in a speech on the House floor this summer, the voting rights that he worked throughout his life – and nearly gave his life – to ensure are, “under attack… [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.” Not only was he referring to the all-too-common deceptive practices we’ve been fighting for years. He was echoing more recent concerns about some of the state-level voting law changes we’ve seen this legislative season.

Since January, more than a dozen states have advanced new voting measures. Some of these new laws are currently under review by the Justice Department, based on our obligations under the Voting Rights Act. Texas and South Carolina, for example, have enacted laws establishing new photo identification requirements that we’re reviewing. We’re also examining a number of changes that Florida has made to its electoral process, including changes to the procedures governing third-party voter registration organizations, as well as changes to early voting procedures, including the number of days in the early voting period.

Although I cannot go into detail about the ongoing review of these and other state-law changes, I can assure you that it will be thorough – and fair. We will examine the facts, and we will apply the law. If a state passes a new voting law and meets its burden of showing that the law is not discriminatory, we will follow the law and approve the change. And where a state can’t meet this burden, we will object as part of our obligation under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

It is both significant and reassuring that the nation’s top lawyer acknowledges the dire threat state voter suppression laws present to our democracy. Yet the sad irony is that, through no fault of his own, America’s first African-American Attorney General may see the worst contraction of voting rights since the Jim Crow era — and the threat comes from a much more powerful place than a handful of state governments.

Make no mistake, voter ID laws are unconstitutional. If the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and equal voting rights mean anything, they must mean that laws intended solely to disenfranchise particular kinds of voters — including many racial minority voters — must not be allowed to stand. Yet, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court largely abdicated it’s responsibility to strike these laws down.

Of course, as Holder notes, Section Five of the Voting Rights Act provides him with an important tool that can be used to block these racially discriminatory laws from going into effect in many states. Sadly, the Supreme Court probably has a plan to remove this tool as well. Conservative lawmakers are begging the courts to declare Section Five unconstitutional, and Roberts has strongly hinted in the past that he wants to give them what they want.

Indeed, forty years from now, it is likely we will look back on John Roberts and some of his colleagues on the Court and remember them for doing more to stand in the way of voting rights than nearly any person since Lyndon Johnson drove the knife into Jim Crow more than four decades ago.