Florida Congressman Ted Deutch (D) told ThinkProgress today that Gov. Rick Scott was engaging in a “blatant attempt to supress voter turnout.” Scott is currently involved in a massive effort to purge up to 180,000 from the voting rolls. The list, purportedly of non-citizens, has proven unreliable. Earlier this week, Seminole County Supervisor of Elections Mike Ertel, a Republican, posted a picture on Twitter of a voter on the list falsely identified as ineligible, with his passport.

Congressman Deutch said that his office has heard from several constituents who have recieved a voting ineligibility letter in error. In light of these errors, Deutch will soon send a letter to Scott demanding the purge be immediatly suspended. An excerpt:

It is out of grave concern that we write to ask for the immediate suspension of the Florida Division of Elections’ directive that county supervisors of elections purge up to 180,000 names from Florida’s voter rolls in advance of the November 2012 elections.

While we all agree that the right to vote should be reserved only to those who are eligible, any process that could strip Floridians of their voting rights should be conducted with the utmost caution and transparency, and certainly not within six months of a major federal election and within 90 days of the primary. Providing a list of names with questionable validity – created with absolutely no oversight – to county supervisors and asking that they purge their rolls will create chaotic results and further undermine Floridians’ confidence in the integrity of our elections. A rushed process will undermine both Florida and federal law requiring voter rolls to be maintained in a uniform and nondiscriminatory manner.

The letter was circulated to the entire Florida Congressional delegation and Deutch expects several of his colleagues to sign on. Deutch noted that while Florida has “no history of mass voter fraud” it does have a history of “mass voter disenfranchisement” that proceeded the presidential election in 2000.

In 1998, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired a private company to create a “scrub list” of duplicate registrations, deceased voters and felons prohibited from voting in Florida. The company’s list, however, was riddled with errors. One person flagged as a felon by the list was actually a Florida judge. A county elections supervisor discovered the list was unreliable when she received an erroneous letter informing her that she was a felon and could not vote. By one estimate, 7000 Florida voters were wrongfully removed from the voter rolls for the 2000 presidential election — 13 times George W. Bush’s margin of victory in that state after the Supreme Court halted the post-election recount.

Deutch said that, in this election, “Governor Scott wants to play the role of Katherine Harris.”

African-Americans made up 88 percent of the voters removed from the rolls in the purge that preceeded the 2000 election, even though they account for only about 11 percent of Florida voters. In Florida, 93 percent of black voters cast a ballot for Al Gore.

Shortly after the Obama Administration announced its new rules to help ensure all women have adequate access to birth control, conservative lawmakers denounced it as unconstitutional under the First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty. This argument is meritless. As conservative Justice Antonin Scalia explained in Employment Div. v. Smith, a law that applies evenly to the faithful and the non-faithful alike does not violate the First Amendment.

In light of this fact, the rules’ opponents have wisely pivoted to a 1993 law known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) which imposes additional restrictions on the federal government above and beyond what’s actually required by the Constitution. Indeed, the several conservative Catholic groups challenging the birth control rules in court cite RFRA in their very first claim against the rules.

RFRA was enacted very much due to a backlash against Justice Scalia’s opinion in Smith. That case involved a relatively obscure Native American religion whose members wanted to ingest the illegal drug peyote during one of the faith’s sacred rituals — Scalia’s opinion said they were not exempt from this law because the ban on peyote applies evenly to all persons regardless of whether they believe the drug has a sacred purpose or not. RFRA’s supporters, including some very prominent progressives, feared that Scalia’s decision would fall heavily on minority religions because they lacked the political power to stand up for themselves in the legislature. Lawmakers who support a ban on sacramental wine, for example, would soon run afoul of their many (and often, powerful) Christian constituents. But lawmakers who want to ban drugs used in relatively uncommon faiths would experience no such backlash.

For this reason, the conservative Catholics’ suit is a bit unusual since they are not the kind of minority faith that many of RFRA’s supporters sought to protect. The Catholic bishops who are driving this effort are politically powerful, so powerful, in fact, that top political leaders like Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) have rallied to their cause. Nevertheless, there’s nothing in the language of RFRA itself which prevents powerful religious groups from invoking it. Under RFRA, the federal government cannot “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless the law that does so:

(1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and
(2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest

Even assuming that the birth control rules “substantially burden” conservative Catholics, however, there are strong arguments that the rules survive RFRA’s test. In Roberts v. United States Jaycees, the Supreme Court established the government has a “compelling interest in eradicating discrimination against its female citizens,” and extending access to birth control clearly advances this goal. As the California Supreme Court explained when it upheld a very similar birth control law in 2004, “women during their reproductive years spent as much as 68 percent more than men in out-of-pocket health care costs, due in part to the cost of prescription contraceptives and the various costs of unintended pregnancies.” Expanding access to contraception targets this problem directly.

The more difficult question is whether the Obama Administration’s rules use the “least restrictive means” of achieving its goal — meaning that there is no way to accomplish the same goal without placing the same burden on religious exercise. In the California suit, the plaintiffs claimed that California could have simply created an entitlement program that provides contraception, rather than enacting a law that led to religious employers paying health insurance premiums that covered some women’s birth control. The Obama Administration’s opponents make a similar argument now, that conservative Catholic employers object that a portion of their premium payments would go to contraception, while an entitlement program would not raise this problem.

This is only half true, however. While it is true that conservative Catholics would not have to pay premiums that cover birth control if the government created an entitlement program, conservative Catholics would still pay taxes that fund that entitlement program. It’s not at all clear why one places a different burden on the rules’ religious objectors than the other.

So there are strong arguments in favor of the birth control rules — strong enough, in fact, that one of the most Republican courts in the country upheld a very similar California law just eight years ago. Of course, that was before the Roberts Court indicated they might embrace an utterly meritless case against the Affordable Care Act, so there is always a risk that partisanship will trump law if this case reaches the Supreme Court. Assuming the justices are in the mood to follow the law, however, the administration has a strong argument to offer against the RFRA challenge.

WASHINGTON, DC — The conservative justices justified their decision in Citizens United that corporations and wealthy individuals can spend unlimited money to influence elections because they believe that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” They are part of a very small minority who believes this. Only 15 percent of the country believes that unlimited spending does not lead to corruption, less than the 19 percent who believe in “spells or witchcraft.”

In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) argued that the five conservatives responsible for Citizens United would never have made such an error in judgment if they had actually had first-hand knowledge of how elections work:

Unfortunately you had the five right-wing judges, none of whom have ever run for any office ever and have zero political experience between the five of them, offering opinions about what money can do in elections . . . . So clearly the finding of fact in Citizens United that unlimited corporate spending cannot either increase the risk of corruption or increase the appearance to the public that there’s corruption is ludicrous. . . . .

The President asked me who I thought, you know, what were the characteristics of somebody that should be appointed to the Court, and I said I think it should be somebody who has some actual political experience out there so that they are not operating in this political arena with absolutely no knowledge. Even if they wanted to come to the result that Citizens United came to, I think those judges would have had a hard time getting there if they’d had actual practical political experience because they would have known what a preposterous finding they were making.

Watch it:

The current Supreme Court includes eight former U.S. Court of Appeals judges and one former law school dean. Four of the five current justices responsible for Citizens United served as political appointees in Republican administrations. The justices who decided Brown v. Board of Education, by contrast, included one former governor, three former U.S. senators, and one former state lawmaker.

The Supreme Court will have the opportunity to correct its error in Citizens United, however, in a pending case challenging Montana’s longstanding ban on corporate influence over elections. Sen. Whitehouse joined Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in a brief urging the justices to “revisit Citizens United‘s finding that vast independent expenditures do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” if they agree to hear the Montana case.

The Miami Herald reports that “Florida’s quest to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls was started at the direct urging of Gov. Rick Scott.” Scott instructed his former Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, to compile a list of people who were registered in Florida but ineligible to vote.

Browning struggled to aquire accurate data and eventually resigned his post in February. Scott moved forward with the effort anyway, and in recent days “the state sent a list to county election supervisors of more than 2,600 people who have been identified as non-U.S. citizens.”

According to election supervisors, the list is riddled with inaccuracies. Seminole County Supervisor of Elections Mike Ertel, a Republican, posted a picture on Twitter earlier this week of a voter on the list falsely identified as ineligible, with his passport:

Passport of one of our voters who recently was incorrectly targeted by the State of Florida as a non-citizen. #sayfie twitter.com/MikeErtel/stat…

— Michael Ertel (@MikeErtel) May 21, 2012

In 2000, the presidential election in Flordia was decided by just 537 votes after many eligible voters were purged from the state roles.

A study by the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice found that actual voter fraud is practically non-existent. According to the study, most cases of alleged voter fraud can be traced back to clerical or administrative errors.

Last week, ThinkProgress revealed that a video by James O’Keefe that purported to expose voter fraud actually featured two individuals fully eligible to vote.

WASHINGTON, DC — Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) admitted that a bloc of mostly junior senators who supported eliminating or significantly reforming the filibuster were “right” and “the rest of us were wrong,” when the Senate failed to pass filibuster reform last year. In an exclusive interview with ThinkProgress yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) predicted that rules reform will happen in the wake of Reid’s admission:

QUESTION: Majority Leader Reid just came out in favor of filibuster reform after he had, um, not been so keen to it the last time we had an opportunity. I know that that’s an area where you’ve done a little bit of work. Do you think that [filibuster reform] is likely to happen when we get the window?

WHITEHOUSE: Yep, I do. . . . I think that the major targets will be the double filibuster, filibustering both the motion to proceed to the bill and then the bill itself. That would be one target. I think the other major target of filibuster reform will be changing the rules of the filibuster so that the filibustering minority actually has to spend time on the floor defending its filibuster, rather than, right now, it’s the majority trying to get to 60 that has to be ready to fend off quorum calls and have all the Senators ready — and only one senator needs to be around from the minority side to defend the filibuster.

Watch it:

The “window” my question refers to is a brief, constitutionally required period every two years shortly after newly-elected senators are sworn in. During this short window, the Senate can alter the filibuster rules or even eliminate the filibuster altogether with just 51 votes. Normally, 67 votes are required to change the Senate’s rules.

As ThinkProgress previously explained, Senate Democrats may not have a choice when the next window opens next January, assuming that Democrats maintain control of the Senate and the White House. Longtime Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) was recently defeated in the GOP Senate primary by a candidate who objected to Lugar’s votes for Supreme Court Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. In light of this precedent, it is likely that the few Senate Republicans who were unwilling to obstruct these two nominees will see the Tea Party in their rear view mirror during the next confirmation fight, and will fear being Lugared. If Senate Democrats do not take their next opportunity to pass filibuster reform, the consequence could be a complete inability to fill Supreme Court vacancies.