As a federal court considers whether to reinstate a South Carolina state voter identification law — denied pre-clearance by the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the Voting Rights Act — one of the bill’s authors took the stand Monday to defend the bill. But when pressed, state Sen. George E. “Chip” Campsen III (R) acknowledged that none of the isolated examples of possible voter fraud that he could identify would have been prevented by requiring a photo identification to vote in-person.

The Associated Press reports:

[Campsen] cited examples of fraud that he took into consideration while drafting early versions of South Carolina’s law. These included vote buying, voter rolls indicating a woman who showed up at the polls had already voted, and press reports of voters being registered in both South Carolina and North Carolina. But under questioning from Justice Department attorney Anna Baldwin, Campsen, a Republican, said the examples he gave did not involve the type of fraud that requiring photo identification would address.

“None of the examples you gave in your testimony involved incidents of impersonation?” Baldwin asked.

“Correct,” Campsen answered. He also said he could not find cases of voter impersonation in South Carolina, but added that the state lacks the tools to root them out.

Last month, the Republican Attorney General of South Carolina also admitted that requiring a photo identification to vote would not actually prevent a determined voter impersonator from voting as someone else. But happily, as Campsen noted in his testimony, it almost never happens.

In fact, it is so rare that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud of any kind. Even the Supreme Court could only identify one example of in-person voter fraud in the past 143 years in their 2009 decision upholding a voter ID law.

By contrast, a recent Brennan Center report found that nearly 500,000 voters — mostly low-income and minority individuals — in states with voter ID laws stand to be disenfranchised.

These voter ID laws continue to be at best a solution in search of a problem — and at worse, a scheme to disenfranchise elderly, urban, poor, and minority voters who are among the least likely to have a photo identification.

A panel of three federal judges has ruled that Texas’ redistricting plan violates the Voting Rights Act. Texas, because of its history of suppressing minority rights, must have any changes to its election law “pre-cleared” under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. D.C. Circuit Judge and George W. Bush appointee Thomas Griffith wrote the opinion, finding that all 3 redistricting plans dilute minority voting power by carving up minority-heavy congressional districts.

Texas’ normal deep red voting pattern was thrown into flux by the exploding population and rapidly shifting demographics in the state. According to the 2010 Census, Latinos comprised two-thirds of the 4.3 million new Texans, while 11 percent are black. Because of this dramatic population growth, Texas was given four more Congressional seats. But when the Republican-controlled Legislature redrew the congressional map to create the new districts, minority Congress members saw their offices carved out of their districts, while white Congress members retained theirs. Judge Griffith found that “substantial surgery” was done to predominantly black districts to cut them off from their representatives’ offices and their strongest fundraising bases, while the districts of white Congress members were either left untouched or were “redrawn to include particular country clubs and, in one case, the school belonging to the incumbent’s grandchildren.” Furthermore, black and Latino representatives were excluded from the map drawing process.

Texas claimed this disparate effect was pure coincidence, but the judges were unconvinced: “We are confident that the mapdrawers can not only draw maps but read them, and the locations of these district offices were not secret.”

The court was also deeply skeptical of the state’s claim that the chief mapdrawer had no idea he used racial data to draw district boundaries:

Texas made [Texas House Republican staffer Gerardo] Interiano’s testimony the cornerstone of its case on purpose in the House Plan. Interiano spent close to a thousand hours…training on the computer program Texas used for redistricting, yet testified that he did not know about the program’s help function, or of its capability to display racial data at the census block level…The implausibility of Interiano’s professed ignorance of these functions suggests that Texas had something to hide in the way it used racial data to draw district lines.

Though Judge Griffith’s opinion will not affect the 2012 race, the court’s finding that the map was drawn with a discriminatory purpose may come into play in the two challenges to the Voting Rights Act before the Supreme Court. The Texas Republicans’ antics in this case could be used as evidence that the jurisdictions covered by Section 5 do still discriminate racially through election law.

TAMPA, Florida — Mitt Romney will reverse course on his campaign pledge to pursue an immigration strategy of “self-deportation” — whereby society makes life so harsh for undocumented immigrants that they deport themselves — according to one of his top Hispanic Steering Committee advisers.

Mel Martinez, the former Florida Republican senator and chairman of the Republican Party, told ThinkProgress on Tuesday that Romney will almost certainly reverse course and take a more “sensible view” on immigration. He argued that Romney’s “self-deportation” policy was simply a product of the bruising Republican primary. When asked if Romney would stick to it if elected, Martinez was frank: “I really, really don’t.”

KEYES: In the primaries, he was advocating a position of self-deportation. Do you think he’ll stick to that?

MARTINEZ: I don’t think so, no I really, really don’t. I think that campaigns are not the best place to make good policy, and primaries are probably the worst place. I think that Governor Romney will have a sensible view towards immigration, which I think hopefully will be good for the country.

Watch it:

Though Martinez may try to Etch-a-Sketch away Romney’s primary positions, Latino voters are unlikely to be moved. A poll last month showed Romney trailing President Obama among Hispanic Americans by 48 percentage points, 70-22.

In addition, Romney still counts Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — the author of Arizona’s discriminatory SB 1070 bill — among his closest advisers on matters of immigration, and his campaign has indicated he would reinstate mass deportations of young undocumented immigrants that President Obama has curbed.

Martinez may hope for a more “sensible” immigration approach from his candidate, but until Romney says otherwise, voters will have no choice but to take him at his word that “self-deportation” is the policy.

Last July, a Florida voter suppression law — enacted by the state legislature’s Republican majority and signed by Gov. Rick Scott (R) — went into effect, putting major new restrictions on groups who work to register new voters. HB 1355 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. Though the bill was put on hold in late May by a federal judge, a new report shows the damage was done: Democratic voter registration in Florida ground to a virtual standstill.

In blocking the new law, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle wrote that HB 1355 would “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 [National Voter Registration Act].” He granted an injunction, he wrote, because the bill could cause “irreparable harm.” When a voter-participation group “loses an opportunity to register a voter,” he noted, “the opportunity is gone forever.”

That lost opportunity over 11 months had a significant effect. The Florida Times-Union reports that over the 13-months period beginning July 1 of the year before elections in 2004 and 2008, the number of registered Democrats in Florida increased by an average of 209,425 voters. Since July 1, 2011 — the HB 1355 went into effect — that number was just 11,365:

Groups said the new rules made it impossible to comply. As a result, many got out of the registration game until a federal judge ruled in their favor at the end of May, 11 months later.

“It has without a doubt hurt registration numbers,” said Deirdre Macnab, president of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of Florida. “It really gummed up the works and made it harder for Floridians to get registered.”

Macnab notes that the rule may have disproportionately hurt Democratic registration as groups often target areas that lean Democratic — “college campuses, senior centers and low-income communities.”

Combined with the Scott administration’s failed attempts attempts to reduce the number of hours for early voting and to purge citizens from the voter rolls, a clear pattern emerges.

Even with court intervention to stop apparently illegal voter suppression efforts like HB 1355, reports like this expose the “irreparable harm” already done to American democracy.

Republicans are said to be the party of deregulation, but their platform this year aims to seriously regulate the pornography industry through strict enforcement of laws against porn or other materials deemed “obscene.”

In a copy of the GOP platform expected to be approved this week, one line reads, “Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced,” indicating that Republicans could be on track to try to cut down on Americans’ access to pornography writ large, as opposed to specifically targeting child pornography, which past Republican platforms have done.

This opposition to pornography is consistent with anti-porn pledges signed by presidential candidate Mitt Romney, one of which included the virtually identical language calling for “strict enforcement of our nation’s obscenity laws.” Yet the GOP’s anti-porn platform is far from consistent with its persistent rhetoric about keeping regulation out of the way of job-creating industries:

Though previous Republican platforms have called for increased prosecution of child pornography, this appears to be the first time that the party has called for a crackdown on sexually explicit material involving adults – a multi-billion-dollar industry [...]

The Internet research firm TopTenReviews estimated that adult pornography revenues through magazines, the Internet and video sales and rentals totaled $9.4 billion in 2006.

A widespread crackdown on porn would also be inconsistent with the Constitution. As the Supreme Court explained in Miller v. California, the First Amendment protects pornography unless the material “portray[s] sexual conduct in a patently offensive way” and does not have any “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Romney apparent opposition to pornography has not prevented him from taking big dollar donations from porn industry moguls. Nor will it help him with his base: Men. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, men make up 75 percent of porn site visitors, and they seem to care more about porn than they do about politics: One single porn site received “4.4 billion page views per month. That’s about 10 times as many as the New York Times and three times as many as CNN.com.”

Republicans this week are expected to approve the “most conservative platform in modern history” at their convention in Tampa Bay. The positions outlined cover everything from promoting anti-abortion measures with no exception for rape and incest to claiming that the Obama administration is advancing the “homosexual agenda” through foreign aid.

And the platform committee endorsed a provision that calls for universities to be denied federal funds if they allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition:

The difference between the lower in-state tuition price and the full tuition price for out-of-state students at public universities is picked up by taxpayer dollars. Republicans have argued against offering in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants as benefit rewarding illegal immigration.

Cutting off federal financing for universities who offer in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants could mean the loss of things such as Pell Grants and research funding if it was actually enacted into law.

The 2012 GOP platform is harsher on immigration issues after Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), who wrote Arizona and Alabama’s harmful immigration laws, pushed for the tougher language. Kobach, who is an informal immigration adviser to the Romney campaign, has insisted that Romney wants SB 1070 as a national model, and he called President Obama’s directive to protect DREAM Act-eligible undocumented immigrants is “illegal.”

Several states already have laws allowing undocumented immigrants to pay in-state rates. And one college in Colorado is allowing students who are not citizens or legal residents to pay a reduced tuition rate, although it is still higher than the in-state rate. But other states are specifically blocking undocumented immigrants from receiving in-state tuition.

Since 2009, a Tea Party organization called True the Vote has been stoking the recently ignited fervor for voter purges and voter ID requirements currently winding their way through state courts. The Houston-based group has involved itself in every major election in the past three years, purporting to defend election integrity from widespread voter fraud.

Wisconsin’s election to recall Gov. Scott Walker (R) was the most recent test drive for True the Vote’s vote suppression project. During the June recall election, a voting hotline received numerous calls from college students claiming True the Vote “poll observers” challenged their right to vote. These poll observers exploited a provision in the state’s new GOP-sponsored voter ID law to claim it was illegal for students home for the summer to vote in local precincts if they had been home for less than 28 days. Others were hassled for proof of residency.

Minority voters in Wisconsin also reported harassment by True the Vote’s white poll watchers, who took notes and watched as the predominantly black line of voters cast their ballots. When Walker survived the recall election, True the Vote congratulated their poll watchers on “a victory of their own making.”

Prior to their efforts in Wisconsin, a judge ruled that their use of poll watchers in Texas’ 2010 elections amounted to an illegal contribution to the Republican Party.

Now, Colorlines reports, True the Vote is planning to take this localized strategy national in November. A major component of this effort will be gathering “evidence” to assist the group’s longer term work to enact voter ID laws and other legislation addressing the nearly nonexistent problem of in-person voter fraud.

As it is more likely that a person will be struck by lightning than that they will commit in-person voter fraud, proponents of voter ID laws have had trouble coming up with enough fraud examples to justify potentially disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of low-income and minority voters. True the Vote is hoping to change that by policing elections with untrained poll watchers heavily recruited from Tea Party events. These poll watchers will record common irregularities like mismatched addresses, typos, or dual registration errors as “fraud” to create the false impression that voting restrictions are justified:

As one strategy, the group buys voter rolls from states and counties, then disseminates the lists to thousands of largely unsupervised volunteers, who are urged to submit to election officials names from the rolls that may be improperly registered.[...] True the Vote encourages recruits to “build relationships with election administrators” because “they control the access to the vote,” as [elections coordinator] Ouren told a gathering in Houston. In 2010, the group was able to get a list of voter registration data from Republican Harris County registrar Leo Vasquez, who reportedly refused the same to the Democratic Party, for which the party sued. When the King Street Patriots submitted to him their list of fraudulent actions they claimed to see at the polls, Vasquez accepted them without verification and held a press conference with Engelbrecht asserting Harris County polls were “under a systemic and organized attack.”

As ThinkProgress has documented, these purge lists are often riddled with errors and frequently disenfranchise legitimate voters. But volunteer voter purges are just one part of the multi-pronged strategy True the Vote will use, in the courts and at the polls, to influence the November election — and, if they can, every election to come.