Today is National Voter Registration Day. With little more than a month remaining until the elections, time is running out for new voters or voters who moved since the last election to register to vote this November. Voters who need a registration form from their home state can sign up for one here.

In honor of National Voter Registration Day, here are five important facts about elections in the United States for voters to bear in mind:

• American Voter Registration Rates Are Unusually Low: Approximately 68 percent of voting age Americans are registered to vote. That compares to 100 percent of Argentinians, 97 percent of Brits, 93 percent of Canadians and 77 percent of South Africans. As the Brennan Center explains, America does a poor job of registering voters because we place the burden of registering largely at the feet of the voters themselves, while most of our peer nations actively encourage voter registration. California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) recently signed another potential path towards closing this registration gap — election day registration for new voters.
• Republicans Want To Make This Problem Worse: Republican officials like Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler both attempted voter purges this year seeking to kick even more people off the voter rolls. Both claimed these purges were justified to ensure that no non-citizens were voting, but purges uncovered virtually “no confirmed noncitizens.” Scott also signed an unconstitutional law making it harder to register new voters. Although a federal court eventually struck down the law, that was not until Democratic voter registration “all but [dried] up” in Florida.
• In-Person Voter Fraud Is Virtually Non-Existent: Republicans have also pushed so-called Voter ID laws, which potentially disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of low-income, elderly, minority and student voters. They claim these laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud at the polls, but, “a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud. One study of Wisconsin voters determined that just .00023 percent of votes are the product of in-person fraud.
• Republicans Want To Cut Early Voting Too: Republican officials, including lawmakers in crucial states like Ohio and Florida, have also tried to limit the number of days voters can cast an early ballot before the election day itself. Courts have given these laws a mixed reception.
• The Electoral College Makes No Sense: Finally, perhaps the most peculiar aspect of the American voting system is the Electoral College, which discourages candidates from campaigning in more than a handful of battleground states and sometimes allows the loser of the popular vote to become president. Several states embraced an effort to largely neutralize the Electoral College known as the National Popular Vote compact.

Bloomberg’s Francis Wilkinson reports that, despite the massive influx of money seeking to buy the White House for Mitt Romney in the wake of Citizens United, President Obama is in a stronger than expected position. This is because, dollar for dollar, the relatively small donations that fund Obama’s campaign can buy significantly more television real estate than multi-million dollar efforts to elect Romney funded by Republican billionaires:

Due to a surviving remnant of campaign finance regulation, television stations are required to offer candidates advertising time at the “lowest unit rate.” They are not required to do the same for super-PACs or political parties. . . .

The Obama campaign (excluding super-Pacs and the party) entered September with about $88 million compared with about $50 million for the Romney campaign (ditto on the exclusions). So almost all of the pro-Obama money — $88 million of $101 million — is eligible for lowest unit rate while less than one third of the pro-Romney money — $50 million of $165 million — is. In recent months, television rates for super-PACs have cost several times — sometimes even five or six times — the rate paid by candidates. As the election nears, station inventory contracts and prices rise for candidates, that differential will shrink. But super-PACs will still probably pay double or more what candidates pay for advertising time.

So the good news for Obama is the dollar he raises from an auto worker in Detroit could be worth as much as five or six dollars from Romney billionaires like Sheldon Adelson or Charles and David Koch. The bad news for Obama is that Adelson is worth more than the gross domestic product of 23 nations put together. So Adelson can effortlessly toss off $10 million checks to support Mitt Romney, while Obama must endure the far more painstaking process of raising money from hundreds of Americans contributing far, far less.

At a forum on education policy on Tuesday morning, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney launched into an unexpected explanation of why big money should be kept out of our political system:

I just think that the most important aspect in being able to have a productive relationship between the teachers’ unions and the districts in the states that they are dealing with is that the person sitting across the table from them should not have received the largest campaign contributions from the teachers’ union itself. . . . The largest contributors to the Democratic Party are the teachers’ unions, the federal teachers unions, and so, if [the unions] can elect someone that person is supposed to be representing the public vis a vis the teachers’ union, but actually most of their money came from the teachers’ union. It’s an extraordinary conflict of interest. That’s something I think is a problem and should be addressed.

Watch it:

Romney is right! When a wealthy individual or organization that has a stake in public policy is able to spend their vast fortunes influencing elections, that inevitably leads to corruption. No one should have any illusions that politicians who enjoy massive support from teachers’ unions are any less corruptible than those who enjoy the support of Republican casino billionaires.

Yet this problem cannot “be addressed,” as Romney suggests, because the Supreme Court declared in Citizens United v. FEC that wealthy corporations and unions have a right to spend unlimited sums of money to buy and sell elections. The core holding of Citizens United was that massive outside spending seeking to change the result of an election “do[es] not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Apparently, even Mitt Romney understands that this holding makes no sense.

If Romney is worried about the impact union donations can have on lawmakers’ behavior, than he should be absolutely outraged by corporate, millionaire and billionaire donations. Federal law permits workers to opt-out of union dues spent to influence elections, which means that union election spending comes from pooling small contributions from workers who did not exercise this legal right. Corporations, by contrast, are under no obligation to seek approval from their investors or other stakeholders before trying to buy an election.

Likewise, the relatively small contributions from workers that participate in their union’s political effort add up to only a small fraction of what wealthy GOP benefactors are able to spend to change the results of elections. The AFL-CIO is the nation’s largest coalition of unions, for example, and its total assets at the end of 2008 were just over $91 million. GOP donor Sheldon Adelson, by contrast, is worth just under $25 billion. So if the AFL-CIO chose to sell its building, liquidate its assets and dump every single dollar into the 2012 elections, it could still only muster less than 0.004 percent of the money just one right-wing billionaire brings to the table.

But, of course, Romney has made it very clear that he is not concerned by the impact of corporate or wealthy individuals’ donations on politicians. Romney promised to appoint more justices in the mold of the four most conservative justices on the Supreme Court — all of whom were in the majority in Citizens United. Similarly, Romney endorsed eliminating all limits on campaign donations so that Wall Street billionaires can write million-dollar checks directly to his campaign and not just to super PACs and other outside groups.

Last week, the Florida GOP launched a campaign to remove three sitting state supreme court justices who previously ruled against Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL). If this campaign succeeds, Scott will be able to appoint three of the court’s seven justices, giving the Tea Party governor control over nearly half the court.

Today, the Tea Party group Americans for Prosperity — which is chaired by GOP energy billionaire David Koch — joined this effort as well. The Koch group’s first ad attacks the three justices because they joined a 5-2 opinion blocking an unconstitutional ballot initiative seeking to nullify the Affordable Care Act:

Many states, like Ohio, gave their citizens the right to vote against [the Affordable Care Act]. But not Florida. Our own supreme court denied our right to choose for ourselves. Shouldn’t our courts protect our rights to choose?

Watch it:

First of all, the Florida Supreme Court’s decision had nothing whatsoever to do with denying people their “right to choose.” To the contrary, the court removed the unconstitutional ballot initiative after the initiative’s own defenders admitted that the ballot language accompanying this initiative was misleading. So the court’s opinion stood simply for the very banal point that voters should know what they are voting for before they cast a ballot.

More importantly, however, by praising this ballot initiative, the Koch group is also endorsing a misguided constitutional theory known as “nullification.” Because the Constitution provides that duly enacted federal laws “shall be the supreme law of the land,” states simply do not have the authority to block an Act of Congress such as the Affordable Care Act, whether through a ballot initiative or otherwise.

Although nullification was very much in vogue among nineteenth century slaveholders and Civil Rights era segregationists, it has largely been avoided for most of American history because the Constitution speaks so clearly and unambiguously that it is not allowed. Nevertheless, it has experienced a moderate renaissance among Tea Partiers after a right-wing pseudo-historian named Tom Woods published a book defending the idea. Woods also once published an article declaring the Confederacy to be “Christendom’s Last Stand.” In it, he endorsed the view that the Civil War was a battle between “atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins on the one side and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other.” He concludes that “[t]he real watershed from which we can trace many of the destructive trends that continue to ravage our civilization today, was the defeat of the Confederate States of America in 1865.”

So the Koch group’s ad does not simply seek to punish three justices for placing the law before conservative ideology and turn Florida’s highest court over to the mercies of a Tea Party governor, it also endorses one of the most outlandish misreadings of the Constitution ever conceived by states’ rights advocates — many of whom later wielded it to defend the most abhorrent practices in American history. The Koch ad demonstrates that one of the most powerful and well-moneyed interest groups in the Republican coalition embraces the worst kinds of constitutional thinking, and that they are eager to seek revenge against a judge or justice who rejects their twisted view of the Constitution. If the Koch group succeeds in taking out these three justices, if will send a clear message to every elected judge in the country that they follow the Constitution at their own peril.

Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) plan to do away with half of Florida’s early voting days has survived the scrutiny of a federal judge. Judge Timothy Corrigan of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida ruled Monday that there was not sufficient evidence that the reduced schedule would disenfranchise black voters, allowing the state to cut required early voting days from 14 to 8.

Corrigan, appointed by George W. Bush, said that while there were “understandable concerns about how the change in the law might impact African American voters, the court concludes that the new law will not impermissibly burden the ability of African Americans to vote.”

Separately, a panel of federal judges decided in August that five Florida counties covered under the Voting Rights Act because of their history of discrimination must continue to hold 12 days of early voting. In that case, the court found that cutting early voting would indeed have a harmful impact on minority voting rights in those counties. While Corrigan referred to this decision in the state-wide case, he reasoned that the risk has already been covered by holding longer voting hours in these 5 counties. He also stated that no counties are planning to stick to the required minimum of 8 early voting days, and about half of Florida’s counties will offer the maximum of 96 voting hours.

The upheld law also gets rid of early voting on the Sunday before Election Day, which saw heavy turnout from African Americans in 2008. 33.2 percent of Floridians who voted on that Sunday were black, while 23.6 percent were Hispanic.

Before this case, Rick Scott was not having much success pushing his voter suppression efforts through the courts. Judges have halted his attempts to curb voter registration drives and purge unconfirmed non-citizens from the voter rolls. Judge Corrigan’s decision will appeal to the Eleventh Circuit, a very conservative court with a recent history of placing ideology before the Constitution.

Last Wednesday, Texas State Rep. Debbie Riddle (R) posted an angry rant on her Facebook page, declaring that “[o]ur soldiers do NOT need to be taught how to be sensitive to radical Muslims. They do not need to be worried about blowing their nose wrong or using their left hand and offending someone.” In response to this rant, a Muslim American law student named Abdul Pasha posted a link to a news report from a conservative news outlet explaining that a recent Defense Department study did indeed recommend that U.S. servicemembers receive training, not to teach them how to blow their nose, but instead to avoid certain behaviors that have led Afghan security forces to attack Americans.

Riddle did not take kindly to Pasha’s attempt to inject facts into the discussion. Most notably, Riddle told Pasha, who is as American as she is, that if he wants to be an American he should “act like one,” and suggested that he relocate to Afghanistan:

This kind of behavior is not atypical for Debbie Riddle. The Texas lawmaker sponsored a copycat bill emulating Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070 law, and she once claimed that pregnant women are coming into the United States to have American citizen babies then returning home “with the nefarious purpose of turning them into little terrorists, who will then come back to the U.S. and do us harm.”