About one year ago, the Supreme Court handed down its most significant pro-corporate decision since Citizens United — a decision which empowered corporations to force their workers and consumers to completely sign away their ability to hold the corporation accountable in a class action lawsuit. As the New York Times reports, this case, AT&T v. Concepcion, has now been invoked at least 76 times to stop a class action from moving forward.

As ThinkProgress explained a year ago when Concepcion was handed down, the practical impact of this decision is that corporations have almost free reign to illegally nickel and dime their workers and consumers out of a few dollars at a time:

Imagine that your cell phone company cheated you out of just $30. Would you sue? Bear in mind that filing a lawsuit will require you to spend hour upon hour filing out forms and drafting complaints and dealing with legal codes that you probably know little about. Of course you can always hire a lawyer, but your lawyer’s hourly fee will eat up all of the $30 you stand to win in just a few minutes. In other words, you, like just about everyone else in the world who is scammed out of just a few dollars, you will probably give the lawsuit a pass.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem — the class action lawsuit. If your cell phone company cheated you and you alone, you’re out of luck. But if they systematically scammed thousands of their customers out of the same $30 — nickel and diming their way to huge profits — the law allows all of you to join together into a class action lawsuit and make sure that the company is held accountable.

That is, of course, until [now].

The significant number of suits dismissed thanks to Concepcion confirms that corporate America is already taking advantage of the gift the Court’s conservative justices gave them last year. In one of those cases, for example, a group of U.S. servicemembers who allegedly were illegally required to pay a few hundred dollars each by the Nissan car company were denied their ability to join together in a class action.

In January, conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe released a video featuring individuals apparently committing voter fraud during the New Hampshire primary. Rather than attempting to document authentic cases of voter impersonation — a virtually non-existent problem — O’Keefe enlisted activists to commit the crime to demonstrate how easy it is to do so. This self-appointed sting operation, unsurprisingly, may itself have violated state laws.

ThinkProgress reported that Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas (R) and Nashua City Clerk Paul Bergeron were both calling for the arrest and prosecution of those involved with the video. Their actions, according to Bergeron, likely constituted Class B felony wiretapping and possibly election fraud. Gov. John Lynch (D) called the videos “outrageous” and endorsed an investigation of whether any crimes were committeed.

Yesterday, O’Keefe revealed that he had cancelled plans to travel to New Hampshire upon learn learning he would be hit with a grand jury subpoena if he did. Speaking, by video, to a local Republican Party fundraiser, he claimed “I’ve been advised that if I appear physically in New Hampshire, I will be hit with a grand jury subpoena,” and expressed defiance. Pledging to continue to employ these controversial — and likely illegal — tactics, O’Keefe said:

I think it’s unfortunate that we live in a country these days where public officials threaten journalists — threaten to put journalists in jail for exposing facts legally. They’ve threatened to do this to me for some time, but we’re not going to stop.

Clearly, the 27-year old has not learned any lesson from previous legal hot water: in 2010, he was sentenced to pay a fine, serve three years of probation, and do 100 hours of community service after pleading guilty to federal charges stemming from a failed stunt at the offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA).

But it remains instructive that the only people actually committing voter fraud seem to be those trying to expose the problem.

The first time Viviette Applewhite went to the polls, she cast her vote for John F. Kennedy. But this year, a strict new voter identification law will likely prevent the now-93-year old woman and many others in Pennsylvania from participating in their country’s democratic process. And Applewhite won’t stand for it.

She will be the plaintiff in the voter identification lawsuit being filed by the ACLU and the NAACP in the state, which claims that “the state’s voter photo ID law violates the Pennsylvania Constitution by depriving citizens of their most fundamental constitutional right – the right to vote.”

Applewhite no longer has a copy of her birth certificate, and she does not have a drivers’ license. Without either of these things, the new Pennsylvania restrictions say that she is ineligible to vote.

But her circumstances are not at all uncommon. African Americans, especially elderly African Americans, are disproportionately less likely to have a birth certificate.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice:

Twenty-five percent of African-American voting-age citizens have no current government-issued photo ID, compared to eight percent of white voting-age citizens.

Harsh voter ID laws, which former President Bill Clinton characterized as the most serious threat of disenfranchisement since Jim Crow laws, have been passed in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. Twenty four other states are trying to pass similar laws.

Watch Applewhite talk about the suit:

ThinkProgress has noted the hardly unsurprising fact that HB 56, Alabama’s draconian anti-immigrant law, has caused Hispanic children to be subjected to increased bullying in the state’s public schools, so it’s not a stretch to imagine that drop-out rates within Alabama’s Hispanic community have risen as students no longer feel welcome. It’s easy to see that the harsh enforcement of the HB 56 legislation is inappropriate in an educational setting; in fact, members of the Birmingham Board of Education passed a resolution last year to oppose HB 56 for this very reason.

Last week, a U.S. Justice Department official added to the mounting criticism of HB 56, saying the harsh legislation has already had “lasting” negative effects on the state’s Hispanic students. Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, head of the federal department’s Civil Rights Division, addressed a strongly-worded letter to Alabama’s education department on HB 56′s consequences for school children:

Hispanic students absence rates tripled while absence rates for other groups of students remained virtually flat. [...] The rate of total withdrawals of Hispanic children substantially increased, with 13.4% of such children having dropped out between the beginning of the current school year and this February.

As Perez goes on to point out, the Constitution guarantees immigrant students’ right to an education — and even on top of that, nearly 99% of all of Alabama’s K-12 public school students are, in fact, U.S. citizens. After conducting interviews with students, parents, and teachers in the state’s public school districts, the DOJ official has determined that many school children of Hispanic origin feel “unwelcome in schools they had attended for years” regardless of their immigration status.

Just as Perez makes clear, the harmful HB 56 legislation has already begun to do its damage. In order to prevent even more negative effects on Alabama’s children — both immigrants and U.S. citizens — it has to go immediately.

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveals a decline in African American and Hispanic American voter registration since 2008, the Washington Post reports. This marks the first significant drop in the number of Latino voters in nearly 40 years.

In recent years, Republicans across the country have engaged in a systematic attempt to suppress voter turnout by pushing legislation to address the largely fictitious issue of “voter fraud.” Their efforts has included bills to make it harder to register new voters, strictly require photo identification in order to vote, and eliminating day-of voter registration. Much of this push has been organized by corporate front group ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council).

Some experts blame the economy for the the decrease in minority voter registration:

Voter rolls typically shrink in non-presidential election years and registrations among whites fell at roughly the same rate, but this is the first time in nearly four decades that the number of registered Hispanics has dropped significantly. That figure fell 5 percent across the country, to about 11 million, according to the Census Bureau. But in some politically important swing states, the decline among Hispanics, who are considered critical in the 2012 presidential contest, is much higher: just over 28 percent in New Mexico, for example, and about 10 percent in Florida. For blacks, whose registration numbers are down 7 percent nationwide, and Hispanics, the large decrease is attributed to the ailing economy, which forced many Americans to move in search of work or because of other financial upheaval.

“The only explanation out there is the massive job loss and home mortgage foreclosures, which disproportionately affected minorities,” said Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, a nonpartisan policy group that focuses on Latinos. “When you move, you lose your registration.”

But with the push for voter identification laws and other efforts that disproportionally disenfranchise minorities, it should come as little surprise that these nationwide efforts are having the intended affect.

Civil rights lawyer Judith Browne Dianis of the Advancement Project told the Post “We’re seeing the squeeze put on voters of color. They were hit by the economy, they have to re-register to vote, and now they are hit by new registration requirements.”

Democrats have expressed concern over the numbers. But rather than worrying about disenfranchisement of voters, some in the GOP are cheering the news. Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told boasted that with the decline in minority voter registration, her party has “really closed the gap in key battleground states,” for party registration.

Welcome to Justiceline, ThinkProgress Justice’s morning round-up of the latest legal news and developments. Remember to follow us on Twitter at @TPJustice

• The Connecticut State Senate voted Saturday night, 19-16, to allow election day voter registration. Governor Daniel Malloy (D) is expected to sign the bill.
• Ten campaign finance reform groups have urged the Federal Election Commission to allow small campaign donations to be made by text messaging.
• Former George W. Bush recess appointee to the Federal Election Commission and strict voter ID law advocate Hans A. von Spakovsky is urging Senate Republicans to filibuster every single judicial nominee in retaliation for President Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
• Stephen Colbert’s Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow Super PAC has spawned at-least nine knock-offs — following the Comedy Central host’s distribution of “Super Fun PAC” registration kits.
• And the U.S. Supreme Court is mulling whether to hear a case about the constitutionality of the use of Tasers by police officers.