A federal judge blocked much of Florida’s year-old voter suppression law today as an unconstitutional infringement on speech and voting rights.

Last year, the Republican-held Florida legislature passed HB 1355, which imposed harsh new restrictions on third-party voter registration groups, requiring them to turn in completed registration forms 48 hours — to the minute — after completion, or face fines. Outside groups often register hundreds of people at a time and, before this law, had used a quality-control process that took days to ensure the accuracy of submitted forms. With the onerous restrictions now in place, some groups like the League of Women Voters were ultimately forced to cease registration drives in the Sunshine State.

In blocking the new law, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle wrote:

The statute and rule impose a harsh and impractical 48-hour deadline for an organization to deliver applications to a voter registration office and effectively prohibit an organization from mailing applications in. And the statute and rule impose burdensome record-keeping and reporting requirements that serve little if any purpose, thus rendering them unconstitutional even to the extent they do not violate the NVRA. [...]

The plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm if an injunction is not issued, first because the denial of a right of this magnitude under circumstances like these almost always inflicts irreparable harm, and second because when a plaintiff loses an opportunity to register a voter, the opportunity is gone forever.

Though state judges and the Department of Justice have already taken steps to prevent voter disenfranchisement, Hinkle’s decision is the first time a federal court has blocked one of the most recent round of state voter suppression laws.

Voters have already begun to experience the effects of new anti-voting laws. Minority voter registration is down significantly from the 2008 election. Among Latinos nationwide, voter registration has dropped five percent; for blacks, registration rates are down seven percent.

New York University’s Brennan Center, which studies voting rights issues, hailed the decision. “Florida’s law and others approved in the past year represent the most significant cutback in voting rights in decades,” said director Wendy Weiser. “Today’s decision will help turn the tide.”

Florida Republican Party Chairman Lenny Curry

Florida Republican Party Chairman Lenny Curry appeared on MSNBC this morning to defend his party’s decision to purge thousands of voters — many of whom are, in fact, eligible to vote — from the state’s voter rolls. But in the course of doing so, Curry admitted that the data Florida is using is flawed:

CURRY: We’re just ensuring that in Florida, which is going to be a critical swing state which will likely be close, that every individual that casts a ballot is a United States citizen. [...] There are certainly some issues with the data.

Watch it:

A 91 year-old decorated World War II veteran and a small business owner in Ft. Lauderdale are just two casualties of the faulty data. In fact, an independent investigation by the Miami Herald found that the largest groups of voters affected by the purge are “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters.” Already, more than 300 wrongly-targeted eligible voters have been identified in Miami-Dade County alone.

Florida Democrats and civil rights groups have called on Gov. Rick Scott (R) to stop purging voters after it was revealed that the Scott administration was instructing election officials to use flawed data from the state’s motor vehicle administration to crosscheck voters’ eligibility. One Supervisor of Elections told ThinkProgress that the process would certainly result in eligible voters being removed from the rolls.

MSNBC host Thomas Roberts challenged Curry on his claim that non-citizens voting in Florida’s elections are a serious problem, to which Curry offered a story of a single non-citizen who supposedly voted in a past election.

Tell Rick Scott to stop Florida’s voter purge by adding your name here.

The newest member of the Luzerne County Republican Party Committee

The elections, which took place in late April, were certified by the committee two weeks ago, and Smith notified supporters of his victory last week by posting a message to the online forum White News Now.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented Smith’s participation with known skinhead organizations like Keystone State Skinheads, (now Keystone United) which he co-founded in 2001. And his racist activism extends far beyond violent rhetoric as well, into actual violence:

In March 2003, he and two other KSS members were arrested in Scranton for beating up Antoni Williams, a black man, using stones and chunks of pavement. Smith pleaded guilty to terrorist threats and ethnic intimidation and received a 60-day sentence and probation.

Smith is also an active member of local Tea Party groups, a network that he used to gain support for his bid for the committee seat. According to the SPLC, Smith referred to the Tea Party as “fertile grounds for our activists.”

Luzerne County is hardly a small rural county either. According to the 2010 census, over 320,000 people live in Luzerne, many in the county seat of Wilkes-Barre, a large city of over 40,000 people. And in an interesting juxtaposition with the election of an anti-immigrant bigot, Luzerne County saw the nation’s largest county-level increase of Hispanics between 2000 and 2010.

When Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) administration distributed its controversial lists of possible non-citizen voters last month, state statute required the state’s 67 county supervisors of elections to send out letters requiring those voters to prove their eligibility to vote within 30 days — a window that will end in the next couple of weeks in many counties. But a ThinkProgress survey of several county supervisors in Florida reveals that the lists of presumed non-eligible voters is riddled with errors. In large and small jurisdictions across the state, supervisors have found that a large number of the voters on the list are indeed eligible voters.

(Click the graphic to enlarge)

Volusia County Supervisor of Elections Ann McFall told ThinkProgress that she and the state’s 66 other county elections supervisors sent a “clear message” to the Scott administration at a Tampa conference two weeks ago. “One after another, [they] got up and talked about inaccuracies [in the state’s voter purge list of alleged non-citizen voters].”

In Miami-Dade, the count of voters whose citizenship status has been challenged by the Scott administration numbered in the hundreds. With time left to respond, nearly a quarter of those sent letters in have already proven their eligibility.

Several smaller counties also confirmed to ThinkProgress that voters have proven that their inclusion on the list was in error.

In Clay County, near Jacksonville, the elections supervisor received two names from the state. One proved citizenship; the other was purged from the rolls for not responding within 30 days. Charlotte County (two out of nine) and Bradford County (two out of nine) also reported significant percentage of errors on the state’s list.

Citrus County Supervisor of Elections Susan Gill (R), who serves a Tampa-area county with a population of just about 140,000, received just three names from the state that it deemed likely non-citizens. But already two of those have produced documentation to verify their citizenship and voter eligibility. One of the two was even born in New York State. The third voter, who has yet to respond to a registered letter, has never even voted.

Gill told ThinkProgress:

Everybody thinks we vote in a computer world. When you do any sort of data matches, you need several data points to make a good match. When the state first sent these 2,600 to us, some of the matches didn’t have enough information. We’re required by law to send a letter … and unfortunately they have to prove their citizenship. Some of them weren’t terribly happy. The state needs to find a better way to do the data matches.

Before the state sends out lists challenging the eligibility of voters — putting the onus on lawfully registered citizens to re-prove their eligibility — it has an obligation to be certain that that list is valid. Clearly, it did not do so here.

The purge of fully eligible voters from the voting rolls by Scott could be enough to tip the balance in Florida and, perhaps, the presidential election. In 2000, the final (disputed) margin was just 537 votes.

Tell Rick Scott to stop his Florida voter purge by adding your name here.

As Alyssa Rosenberg observed recently, America’s struggle for marriage equality has now reached the stage where people who still harbor anti-gay sentiments are coming to terms with gay couples’ right to equality. Alyssa writes on pop culture, so she spotted this trend in an interview where rapper 50 Cent simultaneously endorsed marriage equality and revealed his homophobic fear that gay men would “grab your little buns,” but a similar sentiment pervades Judge Michael Boudin’s opinion today striking down the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act.

To be clear, nothing in Boudin’s opinion suggests that he fears marauding bands of gays will corner him in an elevator and play grab-ass, but Boudin goes to great pains to deny that a law that systematically excludes gay couples from the dignity of full marriage rights is motivated by “hostility to homosexuality.” “Traditions are the glue that holds society together,” Boudin proclaims, and the desire to maintain what marriage discrimination’s supporters call the traditional definition of marriage “is strong and can be honestly held.”

And yet Boudin ultimately concludes that the Constitution does not allow the federal government to exclude gay couples from federal marriage benefits once they are lawfully married by a state. He’s right about this, but he reaches this conclusion in a somewhat roundabout way.

Admittedly, Boudin’s task is muddled by genuinely incoherent Supreme Court precedents. Forty years ago, the Court said that minority groups that are “saddled with such disabilities, or subjected to such a history of purposeful unequal treatment, or relegated to such a position of political powerlessness as to command extraordinary protection from the majoritarian political process” are entitled to the strictest constitutional protections against discrimination. LGBT Americans are obviously such a group. Yet the Supreme Court has declined to extend this heightened constitutional scrutiny to anti-gay laws when given the opportunity to do so.

At the same time, the Court has also applied something more rigorous than very cursory constitutional scrutiny it applies to most laws when examining many anti-gay laws. Thus, the justices struck down an anti-gay Colorado constitutional amendment — holding that the amendment’s “sheer breadth is so discontinuous with the reasons offered for it that the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects.”

Boudin reconciles these two lines of precedent by noting that the Supreme Court may not accord the most rigorous scrutiny to all discriminatory laws, but it has still struck down laws “in which courts have had reasons to be concerned about possible discrimination.” Citing decisions striking down discrimination against “women, the poor and the mentally impaired,” Boudin notes that “gays and lesbians have long be the subject of discrimination,” and that is reason to treat DOMA with skepticism.

If Boudin had stopped there, or maybe a few paragraphs later where he explains that DOMA strips same-sex spouses of “meaningful economic benefits” similar to the benefits denied in other laws that were struck down, he would have provided an excellent argument for why marriage discrimination cannot be squared with our Constitution and declared that marriage equality must be the law of the land.

Judge Boudin, however, is clearly worried about what I have at times labeled the “Alabama Problem” — meaning that a Supreme Court decision recognizing the Constitution’s full promise of equality must necessarily extend to states with a legacy of massive resistance to the Court’s civil rights decisions. The justices may not yet be ready to take such a politically controversial plunge. Significantly, Michael Boudin does not appear ready to take that plunge either, and so he inserts a bizarre states rights argument into an otherwise excellent opinion:

[T]he denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples lawfully married does burden the choice of states like Massachusetts to regulate the rules and incidents of marriage; notably, the Commonwealth stands both to assume new administrative burdens and to lose funding for Medicaid or veterans’ cemeteries solely on account of its same-sex marriage laws. These consequences do not violate the Tenth Amendment or Spending Clause, but Congress’ effort to put a thumb on the scales and influence a state’s decision as to how to shape its own marriage laws does bear on how the justifications are assessed.

The upshot of this paragraph is that it allows Boudin to conclude that states like Alabama can continue to exclude gay couples from the Constitution’s promise of equality, while still extending that promise to couples in Massachusetts. But it is bad constitutional law that bears a disturbing resemblance to arguments the Affordable Care Act’s opponents have used to attack Medicaid. America should not have to choose between the blessings of equality and the certainty that our national leaders can adequately address national problems such as the deficiencies in our health care system.

Ultimately, however, Boudin’s opinion is a cause for optimism. The last federal appeals judge to strike a blow for marriage equality, Judge Stephen Reinhardt, is a well-known liberal crusader with little influence over the conservative justices. Boudin, by contrast, is a Republican appointee who’s clearly still uncomfortable with Constitution’s promise of equality throughout America. And yet he just published an opinion striking down the Defense of Marriage Act. This bodes well for gay couples when DOMA comes before the Supreme Court.

The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, has become the nineteenth group to leave the American Legislative Exchange Council. Walmart’s departure from the right-wing legislation-crafting group is particularly salient because the big box chain is also the largest purveyor of firearms in the country.

Eighteen other groups have dropped ALEC since their ‘Stand Your Ground’ legislation came under scrutiny in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Walmart is now the largest company to do so.

Other large companies, including State Farm and Johnson and Johnson, have not yet withdrawn their membership.

Groups that have dropped ALEC include: Amazon.com, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft, Wendy’s, Mars, Inc., Arizona Public Service, the National Board for Professional Teaching StandardsScantron, The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Kaplan, Procter & Gamble, Yum! Brands, five Pennsylvania legislators, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Reed Elsevier, American Traffic Solutions, Intuit, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher

Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher, a former Democratic state representative, told ThinkProgress in an interview that while the state of Florida sent her county 115 names of voters it considered “sure matches” with a list of non-citizens, her office determined the list’s documentation to be “not credible” and has not sent out letters asking for verification of citizens to any of those voters.

Bucher said:

We need to make sure we have reliable and credible information, by a preponderance of evidence. We could prove that the information was not credible before sending letters and even the Division of Elections has admitted substantial flaws. I did not feel we had credible information and told them I wouldn’t send [any letters] until they could give me a better list.

This thing is not working out so well, we know the information [on which the state relied to flag these names] is very old. They [listed the voter's] last transaction date with [the Florida Department of] Highway Safety — in many cases, [the was 2000, 2002]. By now they probably have become citizens – I questioned immediately.

Bucher says that given the documented inaccuracies around the state, the purge effort should be stopped. “We just want to have accurate data—why disturb voters and ask for extraordinary information? What if they get a letter and they’re on vacation, think it’s just mail, ignore it? We hope the state cleans it up very quickly.”

The Supreme Court is presently considering whether to hear a Montana Supreme Court case holding that the Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United does not prevent Montana from stemming the flow of corporate money into politics. Republican leaders and corporate interest groups like the Chamber of Commerce asked the justices to double down on Citizens United, while twenty-two additional states have asked the Court to close the floodgates unleashing unlimited money into state elections.

It is possible, if extremely unlikely, that the justices will use this opportunity to fix the error they committed in Citizens United. Even if one of the five conservatives responsible for the explosion of money in politics does reconsider his mistake, however, the Supreme Court’s calendar makes it all but certain that Citizens United will remain in effect until after the 2012 election:

The Supreme Court will consider the major sequel to its controversial ruling on campaign finance at the Justices’ private Conference on June 14, the Court’s electronic docket showed Tuesday. The case is American Tradition Partnership, et al., v. Bullock (11-1179). The Court will be considering a request to overturn, without briefing or argument, a Montana Supreme Court ruling that upheld a state law curbing the campaign spending of corporations in that state — a ruling that is said to conflict directly with the Justices’ 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, allowing such spending.

If the Justices choose not to reverse that state decision summarily, they are likely to grant review and put the case over to the new Term starting October 1, with a decision likely after this year’s election. The state court ruling, in the meantime, is on hold, thus allowing corporations to spend freely in Montana in this year’s election cycle.

Republican interest groups plan to spend about $1 billion to buy Mitt Romney a new house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue between now and the end of this cycle.

It is, of course, possible that the justices will decide that removing the taint of corruption Citizens United imposes on American democracy is so urgent that they should hear the case during a special summer session, but this is a highly irregular procedure that only occurs when the justices believe it is unusually important that the case be decided quickly — such as when the Court’s five conservatives decided to shackle our democracy with Citizens United in the first place.

Abdul Awkal with his attorney David Singleton

Awkal, who was diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder, believes that he advises the CIA on “Islamic religion and culture,” and he’s spent more than a decade writing letters to former CIA directors and to President Obama offering advice on the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although he was sentenced to die for a double murder, Awkal says that he is going to be killed because the “CIA wanted him dead.”. He has a long history of hallucinations and mental breakdowns and was once ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Singleton tells ThinkProgress that he will ask Kasich to reconsider his decision, and that Awkal’s legal team will also seek relief in state and, if necessary, federal court. Awkal could have a strong case. The Supreme Court held in Panetti v. Quarterman that it is unconstitutional to execute a person who is unable to “‘comprehen[d] the reasons’” for his punishment” or who is “unaware of … why [he is] to suffer it.” If Awkal truly believes that he is being executed because the CIA wants him dead, rather than because he committed a serious crime, than he is constitutionally beyond the reach of Ohio’s death chamber.

Ultimately, however, the fact that Awkal’s attorneys need to prove exactly how insane he is in order to save his life highlights the absurdity of America’s rules for state-sponsored killings. The Supreme Court has already recognized that the Constitution forbids executions of juvenile offenders or the mentally retarded because diminished mental capacity makes it harder for an offender “to understand and process information, to learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, or to control impulses—that also make it less likely that they can process the information of the possibility of execution as a penalty and, as a result, control their conduct based upon that information.” The same logic also applies to a severely mentally ill man such as Abdul Awkal.

Yesterday, Florida GOP Chair Lenny Curry released a statement defending Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) plan to purge tens of thousands of voters from Florida’s voter roles. The purge is based on an error riddled list of purportedly ineligible voters which includes hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens in just one county. According to Curry, purging voters is just like a DUI checkpoint:

This past Memorial Day weekend, law enforcement put up checkpoints to ensure drunk drivers did not threaten the safety of fellow motorists. Undoubtedly, many of the drivers who were met by police were, in fact, not driving drunk. However, we accept the notion that on such a heavily traveled holiday, a few moments of inconvenience to law-abiding drivers is worth it if we can ensure safe highways.

Similarly, officials in Florida are undertaking a methodical and reasonable effort to maintain the security of Florida’s voter rolls. While some who are citizens, and others who are not deceased, may be asked to simply participate in the verification process, thousands of these records do accurately reflect non-citizens and people who have died.

But, of course, police do not throw sober drivers in jail or take away their license. Curry’s metaphor would only make sense if Florida police randomly pulled over and jailed thousands of citizens, with little evidence they had been drinking, and then required them to show proof of their soberness before letting them out of jail. Officials in Florida are carrying out the purge by sending an ominous and legalistic letter to voters targeted as non-citizens that requires them to request “an administrative hearing to present evidence” in order to dispute the State of Florida’s determination or be removed from the voter rolls.

Moreover, the Florida voter purge disproportionately affects Hispanics and Democrats. Fifty-eight percent of the list of more than 2,600 potential non-citizens are Hispanic while Hispanics make up only 13% of Florida’s population, a fact that places Florida in likely violation of federal law. The Voting Rights Act not only forbids laws that are passed specifically to target minority voters, it also strikes down state voter procedures that have a greater impact on minority voters than on others.

–Alex Brown

Too inexperienced to be president

“I was speaking with one of these business owners who owns a couple of restaurants in town,” Romney said. “And he said ‘You know I’d like to change the Constitution, I’m not sure I can do it,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birthplace of the president being set by the Constitution, I’d like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States.‘”

Romney continued: “You see then he or she would understand that the policies they’re putting in place have to encourage small business, make it easier for business to grow.

Watch it:

Romney’s amendment would come as quite a shock to the last person to earn the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) graduated from the Naval Academy in 1958 and served more than two decades in the United States Navy, including more than five years as an prisoner of war. After retiring from the Navy at the rank of captain, McCain turned to politics and was elected to the House in 1983 and to the Senate in 1987. Because McCain devoted his life to serving his country, rather than to working in business, the Romney amendment would disqualify him from the White House.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower would likely suffer a similar fate. Like McCain, Eisenhower was a career officer before entering politics, graduating from West Point in 1915 and eventually commanding the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. It’s not clear whether Romney’s amendment would count the time Eisenhower spent as President of Columbia University as “working in business,” and Eisenhower did work two years supervising the night shift at a creamery before entering college. Unless Romney would allow Eisenhower to count his time in academia as business experience, however, Eisenhower lacked the three years required to become president under the Romney amendment. Saving human civilization from Adolf Hitler is not a sufficient qualification.
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The massive voter purge order by Governor Rick Scott in Florida has been plagued with errors, resulting in election officials notifying hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens that they are ineligible to vote.

In response, the Scott administration has vowed to intensify its efforts to remove registered voters from the rolls.

Initially, the state created a list of over 180,000 purported “non-citizens” by comparing their list of registered voters to the state motor vehicle database. The state forwarded about 2700 names from that list to local officials to remove from the rolls. Yesterday, in the face of mounting problems with the limited effort, Scott administration officials made it clear they were just getting started:

Chris Cate, a spokesman for the state Division of Elections, defended the state’s actions. “It’s very important we make sure ineligible voters can’t cast a ballot,” he said in an email to the Herald on Tuesday.

He said the state continues to identify ineligible voters, saying the state Division of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has agreed to update information using a federal database that the elections division couldn’t access directly.

“We won’t be sending any new names to supervisors until the information we have is updated, because we always want to make sure we are using the best information available,” Cate wrote. “I don’t have a timetable on when the next list of names will be sent to supervisors, but there will be more names.”

It’s unclear how the new procedures alluded to by Cate will solve the systemic problems with the voter purge list. There have been several individuals targeted by the list that have been citizens their entire lives. Therefore, there seems to be a major problems beyond outdated citizenship information.

Moreover, the entire process of database matching to remove voters is problematic. The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.”

The first list was also created with information accessible to the state motor vehicle administration, which the former Secretary of State Kurt Browning considered so unreliable he refused to release. Browning resigned in February.