HOUSTON, Texas — Last week, the nation learned about True The Vote, a Houston-based tea party group that fans out to heavily-minority precincts and challenges voters’ ballots.

As they work to suppress voters this election, across town, a far different story was unfolding: scores of volunteers fanning out not to stop people from voting, but to help them vote.

ThinkProgress was on the ground for the first annual National Voter Registration Day, a nationwide event for grassroots groups to help register voters. (The day was designed to take place prior to October 6, when Texas and a handful of other states have their registration deadline.) We attended numerous events throughout the day, including a radio-hyped registration table outside a breakfast diner, a hip-hop concert where tickets were distributed to those who registered and/or pledged to vote, and a comedy show where the comic interspersed jokes with pleas for young folks to get out and vote.

Watch a short video with highlights from the day:

Last year, Texas passed some of the worst anti-voter legislation of any state in the country. They enacted a voter ID law, which allowed voters to bring a gun license to the polls but not a student ID; it has since been blocked by the Department of Justice. In addition, they are on the leading edge of states passing new, onerous restrictions on voter registration groups like the League of Women Voters.

Still, despite the new regulations making their job more difficult, voter registration groups were out in full force Tuesday, doing their best to get as many people as possible registered to vote.

The Republican National Committee is cutting ties to Strategic Allied Consulting, a voter registration firm under investigation for turning in fraudulent voter registration forms in Florida. The RNC hired the firm to do voter registration drives for $3.1 million this year.

The firm’s founder, Nathan Sproul, is a longtime Republican strategist whose reputation was tarred by widespread accusations of voter registration fraud and attempts to suppress Democratic voter turnout. George W. Bush’s campaign reportedly paid Sproul over $8 million for his work in the 2004 election. Sproul, now under new scrutiny, claims he started Strategic Allied Consulting because the RNC wanted to hide his past:

Sproul said he created Strategic Allied Consulting at the RNC’s request because the party wanted to avoid being publicly linked to the past allegations. The firm was set up at a Virginia address, and Sproul does not show up on the corporate paperwork.

“In order to be able to do the job that the state parties were hiring us to do, the [RNC] asked us to do it with a different company’s name, so as to not be a distraction from the false information put out in the Internet,” Sproul said.

The committee is now scrambling to distance itself from Sproul after Florida launched a criminal investigation into the company. Strategic Allied Consulting submitted 106 “questionable” voter registration forms to the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, and several other counties have discovered fraudulent forms as well. The Florida GOP fired the firm on Tuesday night.

Republicans have launched relentless efforts to prevent in-person voter fraud, which is exceptionally rare, yet seem to have ignored the real threat of voter registration fraud by their own consultant. In a twist one Florida Supervisor of Elections called “ironic,” Sproul’s organization was in fact registering dead voters as Republicans, even as Republican lawmakers all over the country justified discriminatory voter purges with the threat of dead voters showing up to the polls.

The following is the first in a multi-part series on the Supreme Court term that begins this Monday. Part I of the series is here.

Ordinary workers and consumers stand on a profoundly uneven playing field when they have to bring well-moneyed corporations to court. While major companies can employ armies of lawyers to protect their interests, middle class Americans rarely have the funds to hire even a single attorney who possesses the same credentials and experience as a major law firm’s army. Indeed, an ordinary family that has just been cheated out of a few hundred or thousand dollars may quickly discover that the cost of hiring any lawyer to recover that money exceeds what they are likely to recover if they win their lawsuit.

For this reason, the law often allows multiple plaintiffs who have suffered similar injuries from the same company to unite together in order to provide a unified front against wealthy corporations. The most common example of this strength in numbers is a class action lawsuit. While few lawyers would be eager to represent a consumer who lost $1000 because of a company’s defective product, many of the best lawyers will eagerly represent a class of tens of thousands of plaintiffs who all suffered the same relatively low-dollar injury. These lawyers normally work on a contingency fee, meaning that they are paid a percentage of the class of plaintiffs’ total winnings — so the bigger the money at stake, the more equal the fight between the plaintiffs’ lawyers and the defendant’s army.

Last year, however, the Supreme Court enabled companies to force consumers to sign away their ability to bring class actions as a condition of receiving a cell phone or a credit card or potentially any other good or service. As a result, it is likely that consumer class actions will eventually become nearly nonexistent, and consumers will lose one of their most important tools in leveling the playing field between them and big business.

This term, the Supreme Court could strike a similar blow against workers. Many federal worker protection laws, including laws guaranteeing a minimum wage, overtime pay and laws preventing discrimination against women and older workers, permit something known as a “collective action” suit. These lawsuits, which are similar to class actions, allow multiple workers who have been underpaid or otherwise mistreated by their employers to join together under a single suit, thus giving them the same strength in numbers that class action plaintiffs enjoy. Yet in Genesis HealthCare Corp. v. Symczyk, the justices could give corporate America a cheap and easy escape valve every time an employer is subject to such a suit.

Collective action suits work in multiple phases. Early on, a single worker must step forward and charge the company with violating federal worker protection law. At a later stage, the law then allows other workers to be joined to the same suit to form the collective action. What happened in Symczyk is that during the intermediate phase of this lawsuit — after the single worker stepped forward but before the other workers could join the suit — the defendant offered to buy off the single worker while giving nothing to the others. Worse, the corporate defendant claims that, because they offered “complete relief” to the single worker, the law requires the worker to take it even if that will kill the collective action suits benefiting all the other workers.

So, the company in Symczyk wants to be able to pick off plaintiffs one at a time, before a collective action can fully form, and thus strip their employees of their ability to bring a collective action in the first place. If the Supreme Court gives the company this power, it will effectively destroy workers’ ability to join collectively against any company smart enough to pay off as few as one of them.

In light of the conservative justices’ recent decision against class actions, workers have every reason to be pessimistic about this outcome of this case.

The University of Texas at Austin

Few things are certain in Supreme Court litigation, but it’s unlikely that anyone will make any money betting that the University of Texas at Austin’s racially conscious admission’s policy with survive the current Supreme Court term. Most of the Court’s conservatives view racial justice issues as almost cartoonishly simple — four justices joined Chief Justice Roberts’ proclamation that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” And while Justice Kennedy’s rhetoric displays more nuance that his fellow conservatives, he’s rarely found a race conscious law he is not eager to strike down. He voted with the dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger, the last university admissions case to reach the high Court.

As one of the lower court judges that upheld Texas’ plan explained, “it would be difficult for UT to construct an admissions policy that more closely resembles the policy approved by the Supreme Court in Grutter,” absent the fact that the University of Texas also automatically grants admission to Texas high school students in the top ten percent of their class. Kennedy was the fourth vote to strike the affirmative action plan in Grutter. With the addition of Justice Alito to the Court’s conservative bloc, he is likely now the fifth vote to strike the very similar plan in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.

Racial classifications are indeed treated as suspect under our Constitution, and for good reason. Race rarely impacts a person’s ability to contribute to society, and so laws which draw racial lines can almost always be assumed to rely on outdated prejudices rather than on sound policy justifications. A student’s race rarely says much about their ability to thrive at a selective university.

At the same time, university admissions officers routinely must choose between two students because of a distinction that says little about either student’s intelligence, drive, or worth as a person. A university may prefer a student who plays the bassoon over an equally skilled French horn player, because the college orchestra’s bassoon player is graduating and someone needs to be admitted to replace them. Similarly, an admissions office might admit one student who plays running back, and deny admission to a defensive lineman with otherwise identical credentials because the football team needs someone to play one position and not the other. The entire university is enriched when it has a full orchestra or a winning football team, and so a good admissions team will sometimes draw a line between two equally deserving students for the benefit of the school community as a whole.

The central insight of Grutter is that racial diversity functions much like an orchestra. Affirmative action is not a zero sum game that takes in equal proportion from a white student in order to give to a minority. Rather, America as a whole benefits from a more diverse student body:

[T]he Law School’s admissions policy promotes “cross-racial understanding,” helps to break down racial stereotypes, and “enables [students] to better understand persons of different races.” These benefits are “important and laudable,” because “classroom discussion is livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting” when the students have “the greatest possible variety of backgrounds.” . . .

These benefits are not theoretical but real, as major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints. What is more, high-ranking retired officers and civilian leaders of the United States military assert that, “[b]ased on [their] decades of experience,” a “highly qualified, racially diverse officer corps … is essential to the military’s ability to fulfill its principle mission to provide national security.” . . . At present, “the military cannot achieve an officer corps that is both highly qualified and racially diverse unless the service academies and the ROTC used limited race-conscious recruiting and admissions policies.”

So the choice facing the justices is not whether the value of improving one black student’s prospects is worth reducing those of a white student. The choice facing them is whether the quality of education offered to all students should be diminished, whether our young graduates should be less competitive in the work force, and whether our military should lose what it believes to be an essential tool to train the best possible corps of leaders as officers.

If their past opinions are any guide, it is likely that five justices are prepared to pay this price.

Over at Slate, Doug Kendall breaks down just how badly President Obama’s judicial nominees have been treated due to filibusters led by one or more Senate Republicans. “The average confirmation time for uncontroversial circuit court nominees rose from 64.5 days under Reagan to 227.3 days under Obama. . . . Similarly, the average waiting time for uncontroversial district court nominees increased from 69.9 days under Reagan to 204.8 days under President Obama. And the number of district court nominees who wait more than 200 days has doubled from George W.’s time to Obama’s.” Kendall uses the Congressional Research Service’s definition of an uncontroversial nominee to reach these numbers, which is a nominee who receives “little or no opposition when votes are actually cast in the Senate Judiciary Committee and on the Senate floor.”

While the rate of judicial confirmations declined steadily since the Reagan Administration, President Obama’s judges have still been singled out for significantly worse treatment than any of his recent predecessors:

Bob Macdonald, the mayor of Lewiston, Maine, is attracting national attention after appearing in a BBC documentary and demanding that the Somali immigrants who live in his town “leave your culture at the door.” Lewiston has become a haven for Somali immigrants who have fled their war-torn and poverty stricken nation. In the BBC documentary, which aired September 11, Macdonald said:

When you come here you accept our culture and leave your culture at the door. I don’t care if you’re white, you’re black, you’re yellow. I don’t care what color you are, when you come into the country, you have to accept our culture. Don’t try to insert your culture into ours.

The comments sparked outrage among the Somali community, but when Macdonald was asked to explain them, he went even further, telling them to go back to Somalia and accusing them of “shirking [their] duties” to their country:

When anybody comes here from any country, they have to embrace our culture. Now, do they have to give up their own culture at home? No. If they want to carry on you know, the Irish St. Patrick’s Day, the French, the Italians, everybody, they all keep their culture, but we all practice a unique culture, and that is an American culture that over 200 years has been developed…Why aren’t you over there fighting for it? If you believe in it so much, why aren’t you over there shedding your blood to get it? Why are you over here shirking your duties? These people are yelling that I’m insensitive to their culture. Well if it’s so great, why aren’t they back over in Somalia? Why are they over here?

Watch it:

The mayor also writes a regular column in the Twin City Times, in which he recently called citizens who want to improve treatment of Somalis in the town “white do-gooders and their carpetbagger friends.”

Macdonald became the mayor of Lewiston after his Democratic opponent, Mark Paradis, died suddenly from pneumonia shortly before the election. After Macdonald won by just seven votes against the deceased candidate, he accused the opposing campaign of smearing him, warning, “I just won, so I don’t have to be quiet anymore. They are going to pay for this.”

Terrance Williams

As the date approaches for the scheduled execution of Terrance “Terry” Williams, who was sentenced to death in Pennsylvania for killing two men that he says sexually abused him, the state’s Board of Pardons voted unanimously today to “hold the case under advisement” in light of new evidence. The board had initially voted to deny clemency for Williams. It was expected that the board would make a final decision today, and the board did not indicate whether it would indeed hold a new vote before Williams’ Oct. 3 execution date.

HOUSTON, Texas — “My supervisor could have easily shown me all this,” Temi Ajannah said as she walked out of the deputy registrar certification training. “Kind of felt like a waste of time.”

Ajannah was one of approximately 120 attendees at Tuesday’s meeting in downtown Houston to become an a volunteer deputy registrar and help others register to vote. Thanks to a Texas law passed last year putting new restrictions on voter registration groups, only people who have attended a training are allowed to assist others in their registration applications.

Though Republicans claim to oppose enacting new bureaucratic rules, new regulations designed to make voter registration more difficult are a key exception. Republican legislators in Texas (as well as in Florida) passed legislation last year making it more difficult for groups like the League of Women Voters to register people to vote. In the Lone Star State, new rules ban people who are not eligible Texas voters from helping others to register to vote, undermining legal immigrants and people with disabilities. The law also imposes mandatory trainings on anyone who wants to help register others.

Prior to March of this year, groups like the League of Women Voters trained their own volunteers, quickly and easily showing them how to register people to vote. Under the new law, volunteers must get certified by the state to do so, making it more difficult and time-intensive for registration groups to operate.

There are a limited number of opportunities to get certified, typically 2-3 per month in Houston’s Harris County. Because of budgetary constraints, Tuesday was the final training in Houston; anyone wants to help register voters but hasn’t attended a training yet will have to wait until the next election cycle.

“As usual, we have a larger than expected crowd,” Suzanne Testa of the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s office said, opening the training. At 120 attendees, the meeting was standing-room only. But two weeks earlier, Testa told ThinkProgress, a massive overflow occurred when 350 people showed up to get their certification.

Volunteer deputy registrars getting trained in Houston on Tuesday

As required by the state, Testa explained on Tuesday each minute detail ad nauseum, such as how to fill boxes on the form like name and address, and counting off five days from a given day when the forms needed to be turned in.

When Testa informed the crowd that their deputy registrar certification would expire on December 31, 2012, groans spread across the room. “I have to come back and get re-registered again in 4 months?” one woman complained.

“If you don’t like the new rules, talk to the legislature,” Testa said.

Most attendees ThinkProgress spoke with afterwards were not pleased to have to drive downtown and sit in on the training that one called “self-explanatory.” Attendee Erica Burnette said she wished there “should be a more streamlined process,” including the option of completing it online. “It’s a bit burdensome to come down here,” she said.

At the end of the meeting, a Nigerian man who’s been a legal resident of the United States for 11 years and hopes to become a citizen next year, approached Testa to ask whether he was allowed to help register voters. She informed the man, who didn’t want his name used for this article, that because of the new law, it was now illegal for him to do so. He told ThinkProgress, dejectedly, about how he’d been inspired recently by a friend of his to “get up and not be an armchair critic, to do something.” Though he cannot vote, he had hoped to take part in the political process by helping others exercise their voice.

Members of an Ohio tea party group are taking it upon themselves to individually police alleged voter fraud, launching challenges to a targeted list of voters that includes hundreds of college students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans in counties President Obama won in 2008. In all, the group has sought to remove from the voter rolls at least 2,100 registrations in 13 Ohio counties, nine of which Obama won in 2008, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The alleged perpetrators of this voter fraud include Lori Monroe, a 40-year-old recovering from cancer, whose apartment for the past seven years was allegedly listed as a commercial property; and eight members of an African American family, whose four-bedroom home where the family has lived since the 1980s was allegedly listed as a vacant lot. The group has also focused on challenging college students for failure to specify a dorm room number, a claim that every election board has thus far found invalid.

The group behind this crusade has dubbed itself the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, an offshoot of Texas-based True the Vote, which champions voter purges and voter ID laws and has been building a “poll watcher” network, an effort documented by Colorlines’ Brentin Mock:

[True the Vote National Elections Coordinator Bill] Ouren and Americans for Prosperity gathered these recruits in Boca Raton in July to instruct them on how they could become “empowered” vessels for True the Vote’s poll watcher program. True the Vote is most widely known for its advocacy of restrictive photo voter ID laws. But while that might garner headlines, the group’s real focus is on policing the act of voting itself. As Ouren declared during the group’s national summit in April, and repeated again in Boca Raton, his recruits’ job is chiefly to make voters feel like they’re “driving and seeing the police following you.” He aims to recruit one million poll watchers around the country. […]

True the Vote encourages recruits to “build relationships with election administrators” because “they control the access to the vote,” as 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.”

Of course, these phony charges of voter fraud – a wildly exaggerated phenomenon — do more than harass legally registered voters; they provide an artificial justification for the real and considerable threats to disfranchisement that come from new restrictive voter suppression laws, such as the move to limit early voting in Ohio, now embroiled in litigation.

In just six weeks, Colorado will vote on Amendment 64, an initiative to legalize and regulate marijuana like alcohol. A new report commissioned by the Drug Policy Alliance outlines how legalization would affect the state’s criminal justice system:

A study conducted by the Colorado Center on Law and Policy estimated that police forces in Colorado spend about 4.4 percent of their budgets enforcing marijuana prohibition, that the judicial system spends 7 percent on marijuana cases, and that 2 percent of the corrections budget also is spent on marijuana-related incarcerations. [...]
Economist Chris Stiffler, who wrote the CCLP report, told the Colorado Independent that his best estimate is that 5 percent to 6 percent of all arrests in Colorado are marijuana related. All told, the study concludes that legalizing small amounts of marijuana will save Colorado taxpayers $12 million a year in the beginning and up to $40 million a year in later years.

Though the taxpayer savings are relatively modest, the human cost of the drug war led the NAACP to endorse Amendment 64. Almost half of all drug arrests in the country are for marijuana possession — more than 500,000 a year. In Colorado, the number is ballparked around 10,000 to 12,000 arrests a year. According to Tom Gorman, who heads a federal program to coordinate regional drug trafficking in the Rocky Mountain, state police do not go out of their way to make marijuana possession arrests. A retired police officer told reporters that it made sense for cops to support legalization:

Law enforcement officers know better than anyone that keeping marijuana illegal and unregulated means the gangs and cartels that control the illegal trade win, and the rest of us lose. Our current marijuana laws distract police officers from doing the job we signed up for — protecting the public by stopping and solving serious crimes. They also put us at risk by forcing us to deal with an underground marijuana market made up of gangsters, cartels and other criminals.

The state capital, Denver, has already legalized petty possession, though police can still make arrests based on state law. Medical marijuana is also legal in Colorado, and full legalization is favored by 51 percent of likely voters. Governor John Hickenlooper (D), however, has come out staunchly against the amendment.

Texas State Rep. Jim Murphy (R)

State Rep. Jim Murphy (R) told ThinkProgress on Monday that if he had his druthers, Texas would “purge the rolls sooner or suspend voters.” Murphy, who last year authored some of Texas’s new restrictions on voter registration groups, argued that if a voter hadn’t voted “in some time,” that person’s registration should be suspended unless they respond to a letter from the state.

KEYES: What do you see coming down the pike as the next wave of legislation on election integrity? Are there other things that come to mind that you’ve been percolating with, trying to make happen but maybe the timing’s not quite right?

MURPHY: I would like to see us purge the rolls sooner or suspend voters. We have places where you have over 100 percent of voters in the county register. When you move, you don’t un-register yourself, you just move. We ought to have a way if someone hasn’t voted in some time that you can be put on suspense and you can send them a letter that says, ‘Are you still there? Are you still around?’

Listen to it:

Texas has already taken steps to try to disenfranchise infrequent voters. In June, the state began targeting 300,000 eligible voters in a purge, but the process relied on outdated information and procedures that were riddled with error. These problems led one Houston election official to refuse to purge voters because the state didn’t “provide any assurance of the accuracy of their list.” Texas already has one of the lowest registration rates in the country, without purging eligible voters.

Murphy, who represents a Houston-based district, spoke on Monday at a candidates’ forum put on by the King Street Patriots, a tea party group recently profiled by the New York Times for its efforts to challenge largely-minority voters at the polls. After narrowly losing his race in 2008, Murphy prevailed in a 2010 rematch, allowing him to push anti-voter legislation during the 2011-12 session. He told ThinkProgress that King Street Patriots, and their subsidiary True The Vote, were “absolutely helpful” in his 2010 race and he was “thankful” for their poll-watching efforts.

Seven years ago, conservatives were widely perceived as being much more concerned with the judiciary than their progressive counterparts. Leading religious right groups held “Justice Sunday” rallies supporting President Bush’s most ideological judicial nominees, and Republican senators threatened “nuclear” tactics to eliminate judicial filibusters altogether (a tactic that, in retrospect, many Democrats now wish had succeeded). Yet a new report by Media Matters suggests that, at least among television news hosts and producers, this enthusiasm gap on judicial issues has reversed itself:

To be sure, 24 minutes of air time is nothing to write home about, but the nearly half-an-hour MSNBC spent discussing the election’s potential impact on the Supreme Court dwarfs all the other networks’ contributions. The Republican Party’s news station, Fox News, didn’t mention the topic at all.

In the years between the Bush judicial wars and today, the conservative Supreme Court gave wealthy corporations nearly limitless ability to spend their fortunes to influence elections. It gave corporations an instruction manual on how to scam their consumers out of a few dollars at a time. It slashed workers’ rights. It told women they shouldn’t be trusted to make health decisions they may later “come to regret.” And it came within one vote of tossing out the entire Affordable Care Act despite no basis in the Constitution’s text or precedent for doing so. The Media Matters report suggests that this effort to reshape the law into a Tea Party fantasy is not going unnoticed by progressives in the media, even if it is receiving far less attention on other television outlets.

To learn more about how President Obama could reverse the conservative justices’ crusade in his second term, or how Mitt Romney’s potential appointees could intensify this crusade, read this Center for American Progress Action Fund report.

SB 1070 supporters outside the Supreme Court

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 latest challenge to the Arizona immigration law’s “show me your papers” provision was turned back by a federal appeals court in a brief order. The Ninth Circuit rejected civil rights groups’ argument that the law fosters racial profiling, and cannot be enforced without unfairly targeting Latinos.
• Another decision out of the Ninth Circuit held that green card applicants whose parents filed for “derivative visas” on their behalf did not “age out” of the system when they turned 21 without their application having been processed. United States Citizen and Immigration Services had been removing applicants from the queue who turned 21, some of whom had been waiting for years, reasoning that they had to start the application process over as an adult.
• The U.S. Supreme Court declined to grant a fourth stay to a death row inmate in Texas who alleged he received ineffective legal assistance. Cleve Foster became the 30th person to be executed in the United States this year, and the ninth in Texas.
• The New York Times features the story of an undocumented Mexican immigrant in jail for the death of a child she babysat, who has become a symbol for the poor legal representation available to immigrant defendants.