Just in time for the Texas voter ID law’s court date today, the Associated Press has released a study finding that hundreds of legitimate votes have been rejected due to strict voter ID laws:

As more states put in place strict voter ID rules, an AP review of temporary ballots from Indiana and Georgia, which first adopted the most stringent standards, found that more than 1,200 such votes were tossed during the 2008 general election.

During sparsely attended primaries this year in Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee, the states implementing the toughest laws, hundreds more ballots were blocked.

The numbers suggest that the legitimate votes rejected by the laws are far more numerous than are the cases of fraud that advocates of the rules say they are trying to prevent. Thousands more votes could be in jeopardy for this November, when more states with larger populations are looking to have similar rules in place.

Voter ID’s supporters justify them by claiming they are necessary to prevent voter fraud at the polls, but such fraud is so rare that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud. One study, for example, found just seven examples of voter fraud out of the three million votes cast in Wisconsin during the 2004 election, a fraud rate of 0.0002 percent. Similarly, the Supreme Court could only identify one example of in-person voter fraud in the past 143 years in a decision approving Indiana’s ID law in 2008. Even a Heritage Foundation expert arguing for voter suppression laws could not cite a single example of voter fraud during a TV interview on the subject. And as a 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice found, many allegations of individual voter fraud can be chalked up to clerical errors like typos in names or addresses.

So voter ID laws target no legitimate problem, but they are effective in skewing the electorate rightward. Voter ID laws disproportionately affect young, poor and minority communities. Indeed, in 2005, the sponsor of the Georgia law, Rep. Sue Burmeister (R-Augusta), defended the discriminatory effect, saying if black people in her district “are not paid to vote, they don’t go to the polls,” and that if fewer blacks vote as a result of the new law, then they were blocked from casting fraudulent ballots.

More than two dozen states have some form of a voter ID law, with 11 passing new rules over the past two years.

Washington may seem dead in the Summer, but there is one event happening on Capitol Hill next week that will cause at least a bit of a stir. The health care lobbying group Strategic Health Care will be holding a “White Trash Reception” on July 19th:

Strategic Health Care says that it regularly throws themed parties where lobbyists and people in the health industry can mingle with Capitol Hill staffers. This event’s theme, however, drives home an image of high-paid Washington lobbyists gathering to snicker at low-income, white Americans. And the event particularly stings because health care lobbyists at Strategic Health Care profit from pharmaceutical companies that make their money on expensive drugs that low income Americans of all races frequently have to turn their pockets inside out to pay for.

Conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser, an ally of Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), is currently facing ethics charges due to allegations that he placed a fellow justice in a chokehold during an argument. Walker, however, now appears to have adopted a selection process for new members of this commission that will ensure Prosser will receive favorable treatment in the future:

Gov. Scott Walker relied on recommendations from a former Assembly speaker who once worked for state Supreme Court Justice David Prosser in appointing members of a commission investigating Prosser, newly released records show.

Three of the five people Walker appointed to the state Judicial Commission earlier this year were presented to the governor by former Assembly Speaker John Gard, the president of Wisconsin Businesses Inc. and a former lobbyist for school voucher proponents School Choice Wisconsin.

Gard told an aide to Walker that he had found people for the commission who were “fiercely conservative” and “will never wimp out,” according to an email recently released along with other documents under the state’s open records law. Gard also wrote that he’d told one of the appointees “what we were looking for and (he) said he would do it if needed,” but Gard’s email didn’t provide more specifics than that.

If it were not for the fact that a state governor’s decisions actually impact millions of lives, this kind of backroom dealing would be comic. Here we have a corporate lobbyist and former staffer to a prominent politician handpicking the people who will investigate whether that same politicians violated ethics rules — and all the time promising that these “fiercely conservative” appointments can be relied upon to toe the party line on an ethics commission.

The mere fact that in Scott Walker’s Wisconsin there is a party line to be toed on ethics is itself extraordinary.

Not to be outdone by an Oklahoma lawmaker’s sore loser proposal to nullify the Affordable Care Act, a right-wing millionaire in Arizona filed a petition seeking to set up several unconstitutional processes to nullify many more federal laws:

[I]t would allow Arizonans “to reject any federal action that they determine violates the United States Constitution.”

That could occur through a vote of the state House and Senate with consent of the governor.

But that also could occur through a popular vote on a ballot measure, effectively allowing voters to decide which federal laws they feel infringe on Arizona’s rights as a sovereign state.

Organizer Jack Biltis said he turned in more than 320,000 signatures. The next step will be for the Secretary of State to determine, after screening the petitions, if there are at least 259,213 valid names on the forms to allow the measure to go on the ballot.

Biltis, who said he has spent more than $1.2 million on the campaign so far, said it is time for Arizona to step up and reclaim its constitutional rights.

Not surprisingly, the initiative’s millionaire backer lists the Affordable Care Act as the “flagship” example of a law he would like to see nullified. The fact that his initiative violates the U.S. Constitution’s express language — which provides that federal law “shall be the supreme law of the land” — does not semm to bother Biltis in the least.

It should bother Arizona voters, however, even those who object to ensuring that health care is accessible and affordable for everyone. If Biltis’ initiative should pass, it will mean that hundreds of thousands of Arizonans will be misled into believing the state has a power it cannot constitutionally exercise. Worse, should Arizona actually attempt to nullify a federal law, unwitting Arizonans could be tricked into beleiving that they do not have to follow the law — and could find themselves on the wrong end of a federal trial when they learn that they were mistaken.

If Biltis does not like the Affordable Care Act then he can vote for federal lawmakers who support repealing it. Bankrolling an unconstitutional ballot initiative will do little more than confuse voters, and potentially lead them to violate the law without even recognizing their actions are illegal.

Republican candidate and tea party darling Ted Cruz made an appearance at a campaign forum last night, and took the opportunity to advance some of the far-right’s favorite baseless conspiracy theories — including a claim that American law is in danger of being replaced by Islamic law:

“In response to questions from attendees, Cruz said he hoped to see U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder impeached and opposed the law that prohibits tax-exempt churches from endorsing candidates from the pulpit.

When asked about whether he viewed “Sharia Law” as a problem in the United States, Cruz said “Sharia law is an enormous problem.”

It’s not. It’s not even a small problem. Although it is common for politicians on the far right of America’s political spectrum to claim that courts are slowly replacing American law with Islamic law, these claims have no basis in reality. Few American courts have ever even mentioned Sharia or Islamic law, and those that have generally only do so in contracts or similar cases where a party before the court agreed to be bound by Sharia law.

This is hardly the first time that Cruz abandoned reality to toss red meat to his Tea Party base. In 2010, Cruz floated a theory about how states can bypass the federal government and ignore existing laws they disagreed with, advocated for a radical rereading of the US constitution which would have rendered Medicaid unconstitutional, and in March, warned Texans about the dangers of a George Soros and United Nations-led intrusion into local communities to eliminate golf and paved roads.

Cruz and Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst are locked in a runoff election to be the Republican nominee to replace outgoing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX). In the May 29 primary, Dewhurst easily defeated Cruz 47 percent to 25 percent, but failed to reach the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff election. The runoff, scheduled for July 31, has already gotten ugly, with both sides exchanging accusations of misrepresenting the facts. The race is expected to be one of the most costly senate elections in the country. Spending already exceeds $25 million.