A GOP congressional nominee in Iowa has a succinct — and tragic — reason for bucking his party’s stance on the death penalty: “we have put innocent people to death.”

John Archer, the Republican challenger in Iowa’s second congressional district currently represented by Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), was asked during an interview with the Des Moines Register editorial board today about any issues where he differs with his party. “I believe the Party platform calls for the death penalty and I’m personally opposed to the death penalty,” Archer said. He pointed to his experience clerking at the Illinois Supreme Court where, he saw, “firsthand” that “we have put innocent people to death.”

QUESTIONER: Are there any issues where you part ways with the Republican Party?

ARCHER: Yes. I believe the Party platform calls for the death penalty and I’m personally opposed to the death penalty. Having clerked for an Illinois Supreme Court Justice, I know firsthand, and unfortunately, we have put innocent people to death. Life is too precious to do that.

Though Archer did not specify a precise case, the morality of the death penalty has been in the headlines recently. An Ohio inmate who had spent 24 years on death row was freed last week after a Catholic priest discovered the prosecutor had withheld evidence showing the man’s innocence. Last month, a Texas inmate was executed despite the Supreme Court’s prohibition on putting mentally retarded individuals to death. Meanwhile, a Georgia man was put to death last year despite a worldwide campaign on his behalf noting that there was too much doubt about whether or not he was actually guilty.

Because of problems with the death penalty that Archer alluded to, including racial and socioeconomic inequities, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D) last year made his state the 16th to abolish the death penalty, 11 years after Gov. George Ryan (R) imposed a moratorium on executions in the state.

Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s finance program Mad Money, is seeing the effects of voter suppression laws firsthand.

This morning, Cramer tweeted about his father, a Pennsylvania resident who stands to lose his right to vote because of the state’s new restrictive voter ID law. Like thousands of Pennsylvania who could be disenfranchised in November, Cramer’s father lacks a voter ID because he’s a senior citizen and does not drive. Cramer also noted that he doesn’t have access to his citizenship documents.

Cramer’s father is one of 750,000 Pennsylvanians whose right to cast a ballot is in jeopardy this fall. Some residents don’t have access to an ID agency, others don’t have access to their birth certificate, and some are just too old for the computer system to recognize their age and give them an ID. In total, approximately one in ten otherwise-eligible Pennsylvanians don’t have an ID that officials would accept under the state’s new voter ID law.

The law’s fate is currently in the State Supreme Court, where hearings will begin this week. If they allow it to stand, it will be in effect for this year’s election.

A House Democratic Twitter account responded to Cramer with a promise that Rep. Bob Brady (D-PA), who represents part of Philadelphia, would “personally see to it that your dad gets the necessary ID and transportation to vote.” Yet even if Cramer’s situation is successfully resolved, hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians who don’t have children on national TV could still be turned away from the polls in November.

As the Pennsylvania Supreme Court prepares to review the constitutionality of the state’s photo ID law, a University of Pittsburgh law professor flagged the flimsy and offensive precedent upon which the lower court relied when it upheld the law. In rejecting the plaintiffs’ argument that the law violates the state Constitution’s guarantee of “free and equal elections,” the court cited the 1869 case of Patterson v. Barlow, which, Professor Jessie Allen points out, serves as a “blatant example of the anti-democratic voter suppression alleged by plaintiffs in the current voter ID case.”:

The law approved in Patterson enacted a complicated set of registration procedures for Philadelphia (with its large working-class and immigrant populations) and a simpler procedure for the rest of the state. . . . The opinion justifies a tougher process for Philadelphia voters because “rogues and strumpets do not nightly traverse the deserted highways of the farmer. Low inns, restaurants, sailors’ boarding-houses and houses of ill fame do not abound in rural precincts, ready to pour out on election day their pestilent hordes.”

For good measure, the court explained that to overturn the tighter procedures for Philadelphia voters “would be to place the vicious vagrant, the wandering Arabs, the Tartar hordes of our large cities, on a level with the virtuous and good man.”

If the language of the opinion isn’t offensive enough, the dissenting opinion makes clear that, even by the standards of the time, the law’s crippling impact on the right to vote should have been obvious. Amusingly, Judge Thompson’s dissent also reveals that the exaggerated fears of voter fraud have been with us for a very long time.

The professed, and possibly the real object of the law, was to prevent fraud in elections by voters. If this was the view of the framer of the act, I must in charity believe that it so engrossed his attention, as to lead to forgetfulness that among the barriers so ingeniously contrived to prevent it, the defeat of the duly qualified voters must inevitably occur. A remedy for a disease must be regarded as empirical, which would only eradicate it by producing a worse. If frauds were imminent by simulated voters, let penalties be provided for the rogues, and set honest and vigilant men to watch them, but let not the rights of honest voters be sacrificed to these apprehensions.

In her op-ed, Professor Allen points out that the Supreme Court could clearly distinguish the law at issue in the 1886 case from today’s photo ID law. But the “generalized and biased fears about fraudulent voting” could be applied equally to the present case, in which Pennsylvania has admitted there are “no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania,” and that they “do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states.” Meanwhile, the law threatens to disfranchise as many as 750,000 state citizens, with new anecdotes of trouble obtaining a photo ID emerging every day.

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R) has decided not to pursue a voter purge he initiated by sending letters asking almost 4,000 voters to prove their citizenship. After 482 people responded with proof and almost 90 percent of the suspected non-citizens were verified through a federal database, Gessler planned to challenge 141 names still in question, but does not have enough time to handle the hearings before Election Day.

Instead, he is handing over the names to county clerks who may challenge them at the polls or when they receive absentee ballots. So far, one person has voluntarily come forward as a non-citizen in Larimer County. The county clerk explained:

It was a guy with a work visa. He didn’t even know he was registered to vote. Somehow we think it was a clerical mistake at the Department of Motor Vehicles when he got his driver’s license.

These remaining 141 people comprise .004 percent of Colorado voters. Gessler blamed the Department of Homeland Security for the time crunch, saying the department “dragged its feet” when Colorado and other states fought for access to a federal database of immigrants and legal residents. DHS eventually gave Gessler access, but Gessler found “no confirmed non-citizens.”

Yesterday, the Senate confirmed Judge Stephanie Rose to a federal court in Iowa, making her the 72nd woman appointed to the federal bench by President Obama. Coincidentally, 72 is also the same number of women President George W. Bush appointed to the bench during his entire presidency — meaning that Obama accomplished in under one term something that took his predecessor two full terms to complete. President Bill Clinton appointed more women to the bench than any other president, 111, but only 61 were appointed in his first term.

Obama achieved his milestone despite a campaign of obstruction by Senate Republicans severe enough that it drew criticism from conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. Unfortunately, President Obama has also been slower than his immediate predecessors in naming judicial nominees. The nominees Obama has sent to the senate for confirmation have, however, been more diverse that the nominees selected by his predecessors.

Earlier this year, President Obama achieved another diversity milestone when he named his fifth openly gay judicial nominee. Three of the four openly gay judges currently serving lifetime appointments to the federal bench are Obama appointees.

By some accounts, Sheriff Larry Campbell has the run of Leon County, Florida — population 277,971. One resident of the area told ThinkProgress that Campbell once got in a bar fight, had his buddies arrest the guy who he’d fought with, then punched the man in the face. When the man asked the Sheriff who he was, Campbell took out a business card, shoved it in the man’s mouth, and said, “I’m Sheriff Campbell.”

Indeed, bluster appears to be a key part of Campbell’s public persona. ThinkProgress obtained a recording of Campbell from a Leon County resident named William Staubs. In the audio, Campbell suggested he could prove his skill with a firearm by using his opponents for target practice:

I’ve been in it fifty or more years but I assure you this, I’m not too old to cut the mustard. I’m still out there . . . I got out with my troops. I go out there and do what needs to be done. I told somebody the other day we have police standards that we have to keep up, that we have to keep our pistol proficiency up. And we have to keep our other police professional standards up. And I had invited the other candidates if they don’t think I can do it, go down and let me shoot at you and see if I can do it any good.

Listen (relevant portion is from 0:48 to 1:17):

Lisa Sprague, an independent candidate hoping to end Campbell’s 16-year reign as county sheriff, told ThinkProgress that, she offered Campbell a deal when he made this statement — “not unless I can shoot back.” She also forwarded ThinkProgress a signed letter from a constituent claiming that Campbell called Sprague “The Bitch” repeatedly:

I attended a luncheon where Larry Campbell also attended in full uniform and accompanied by an LCSO employee in uniform. During the luncheon he discussed your political campaign. During the course of the conversation he frequently referred to you as “The Bitch” in a demeaning manner. My feeling at the time was that this was a term that he generally used when referring to you or your campaign.

Campbell has 80 percent name recognition in Leon County, with an unfavorability rating of 40 percent. In an interview with a local newspaper, Campbell “totally and unequivocally” denies calling Sprague a bitch.

Nine thousand citizens in Harris County, Texas recently received letters warning them their voter registrations may be cancelled because they might be dead. If they were in fact still alive, these voters had 30 days to respond or be purged from the rolls.

But on Monday, Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and voter registrar Don Sumners announced he would not purge any of the contested names from the voter roll, at least until after the election. After receiving about 300 complaints from the allegedly deceased voters, Sumner decided the list of names compiled by the Texas Secretary of State was too unreliable.

“We’re not even going to process any of the cancellations until after the election. Because we’ve gotten such a response from people that say that they are still alive,” he said.

Harris County is the birthplace of the Tea Party group True the Vote, which champions voter purges and voter ID laws.

While the state regularly purges dead voters from the rolls using data from the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Texas passed a bill requiring the Secretary of State to use data from the Social Security Administration to widen the net. The Houston Chronicle reports:

“The process is nothing new,” [Secretary of State spokesman Rich Parsons] said. “What’s new is the use of the Social Security Administration’s death master file. The Social Security Administration, as I understand it, had made clear to our office that they don’t guarantee or provide any assurance of the accuracy of their list.” [...]

In some cases, the voter’s birth date, name, or other identifying data is considered a strong enough match to death records to remove the voter from the roll automatically; when the match is weaker, the voter is sent a letter giving him an opportunity to prove he is alive. Last week’s batch mailing was unusually large, local and state officials said.

The dead voter is a popular phantom in voter fraud lore. South Carolina launched an investigation in the winter but could find no evidence of dead people voting.