Florida has officially restarted it’s controversial purge of registered voters less than 6 weeks before election day. Governor Scott’s intention to resume the effort, detailed in a PowerPoint presentation, was first reported by ThinkProgress.

Initially, Florida identified 180,000 potential non-citizens to be purged from the voter rolls. That list was subsequently narrowed down to 2600 “sure fire” non-citizens. When it became clear in early June that even the smaller list was riddled with errors, elections officials stopped the effort.

According to the Miami Herald, Florida has sent just 198 names to local election supervisors. (Of those, no more than 36 have ever cast a ballot.) But there is already evidence that the latest list still is not accurate. From the Herald:

For voters like Yeral Arroliga, it’s a pain.

Arroliga, 25, who immigrated from Nicaragua in 1995, said he already sent his proof of citizenship earlier this summer under the first version of the purge program. He’s ready to do it again, after ending up on the new list. But he’s not happy about it.

“It sounds like you have Big Brother watching over you,” he told The Herald. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

Of this list of 198 potential non-citizens, about 58 percent are minority — 41 percent Hispanic and 17 percent black.

Multiple election officials have spoken out against the latest purge. Volusia County Supervisor of Elections Ann McFall, a Republican, told ThinkProgress “It just doesn’t help us whatsoever… It’s awful.”

Reacting to the New York Police Department’s aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics, the Bronx district attorney’s office has halted all prosecutions of people at public housing projects for trespassing, unless and until they can conduct an interview with the arresting officer. This is the “first known instance in which a district attorney has questioned any segment of arrests resulting from stop-and-frisk tactics,” according to the New York Times.

The NYPD’s stop-and-frisk tactics came under fire after news emerged that police stops in New York City increased by more than half a million between 2003 and 2011, and that New York officers conducted more stops of young black men in 2011 than there are young black men in the city. A significant proportion of NYPD stops, 10 to 15 percent, occur at public housing facilities, where police can arrest someone who they believe does not live at the housing project and is not a guest.

After receiving numerous complaints from defense attorneys about trespass arrests, Jeanette Rucker of the Bronx DA’s office conducted an investigation that yielded disturbing results. The New York Times explains:

[S]he found that “in many (but not all) of the cases the defendants arrested were either legitimate tenants or invited guests,” she wrote.

In some cases, Ms. Rucker claimed, the police arrested people even when there was persuasive evidence that they were not trespassing, citing “several instances where defendants who were guests, had the person whom they were visiting verify this fact to the arresting officer, yet the defendant was arrested anyway.” In those cases, the deposition from the arresting officer “indicated the defendant did not know the name of any tenant or the apartment number.”

From 2009 to 2011, the police arrested more than 16,000 people on trespass charges in public housing, according to a report filed as part of the federal litigation over the arrests.

According to another account by counsel for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, some officers were under the mistaken impression that they “were entitled to stop and question anyone inside” public housing.

The findings led the DA’s office to require in-person interviews with arresting officers before prosecuting people for trespass in public housing. But as the Legal Aid Society in New York’s chief lawyer Steven Banks says, this is exactly the type of thing prosecutors should be doing anyway to verify the legal support for these arrests.

Over the last few months, the number of stops has dropped a dramatic 34 percent, following public outcry, new NYPD policies and three court rulings that question NYPD tactics. But that has not changed the impression that the stops are deeply discriminatory. A poll out earlier this week found that 64 percent of New Yorkers, and 80 percent of African Americans, think the police favor whites. The poll also found that a majority of New Yorkers think stop-and-frisk has led to the harassment of innocent people.

Our guest blogger is Jack Jenkins, Writer and Researcher with the Faith team at the Center for American Progress.

The days during this year’s celebration of Ramadan—a holy month for Muslims which began July 20 and ended at sundown on August 18—saw one of the largest spikes in Islamophobic incidents in the United States in a decade. The incidents, which continue to occur, are widespread and often violent, and although some of the perpetrators have been apprehended and charged, most have not been caught. Many cases are still under investigation.

The Center for American Progress has produced an infographic about the ongoing issue, seen below.

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks more than 11 years ago, Muslim Americans – who continuously denounce the violent actions of foreign extremists – and their houses of worship have been subject to threats, vandalism, violence, and even arson. The recent rise in violent targeted crimes against Muslim Americans represents a threat to all Americans and violates core principles on which our nation was founded: religious freedom, the right to worship freely and according to one’s conscience, and tolerance.

One year ago, a proposed Minnesota constitutional amendment that would write a common voter suppression law into that state’s constitution seemed all but certain to pass. According to a recent poll, however, support for voter ID in Minnesota has since taken a sharp downturn:

Minnesotans favor a constitutional change that would require voters to show government-issued photo ID before casting ballots, but their support has weakened dramatically over the past year, the Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found.

Slightly more than half of likely voters polled — 52 percent — want the changes built around a photo ID requirement, while 44 percent oppose them and 4 percent are undecided.

That is a far cry from the 80 percent support for photo ID in a May 2011 Minnesota Poll, when the issue was debated as a change in state law. Support among Democrats has cratered during a year marked by court battles, all-night legislative debates and charges that the GOP is attempting to suppress Democratic votes. . . . But 52 percent approval is a thin margin for a constitutional amendment six weeks before the election. A change in the Constitution must secure a majority of “yes” votes from all ballots cast. That means a voter who doesn’t vote on the issue in effect votes no, setting a higher bar for passage.

The fact that support for voter ID began at such stratospheric levels reveals the challenge facing voting rights advocates. In reality, voter ID laws serve no purpose other than disenfranchising many elderly, minority, student and low-income voters, but the idea of requiring voters to show ID at the polls is intuitive to most Americans.

Nevertheless, the ballot initiative’s cratering support proves that this mistaken intuition can be defeated as voters come to understand that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud.

An Illinois appeals court upheld a ruling Friday that exempted pharmacists with religious objections from prescribing emergency contraceptives, finding that the medical professionals were protected by state law. The plaintiffs, both individual pharmacists and corporations that own pharmacies, had challenged an order by then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich requiring that pharmacists sell “Plan B,” a brand of the contraceptive also known as the “morning-after pill.”

The court rejected the ACLU’s argument that prescribing emergency contraceptives fell under an exception in the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience for “emergency medical care,” even though doctors testified that the contraceptive was most effective when taken immediately after unprotected intercourse.

The three-justice panel did narrow the scope of the lower court’s ruling, which had entirely blocked the governor’s requirement to provide contraceptives. The appeals court held instead that the state law merely prohibits enforcement of the order against plaintiffs who claim a religious exemption.

The court’s decision to allow individual pharmacists to claim the protection of the law is not particularly surprising, given the Illinois statute’s broad wording: “No physician or health care personnel shall be civilly or criminally liable to any person, estate, public or private entity or public official by reason of his or her refusal to perform, assist, counsel, suggest, recommend, refer or participate in any way in any particular form of health care service which is contrary to the conscience of such physician or health care personnel.”

But it is perplexing, to say the least, that the court extended that protection to the corporate plaintiffs, which had established across-the-board policies of refusing to provide emergency contraceptives. In making no distinction whatsoever between the right of individuals to exempt themselves from the law because of their personal religious views, and the alleged rights of the corporate entity to impose those views on employees, the court not only raises the question of whether a corporation can exercise religion (at issue in Colorado litigation over contraception); it also disregards the statute’s explicit reference to ”physicians” and “health care personnel” individually, and not to pharmacies, hospitals or any other such entities.

In a last-minute effort to protect the restrictive voter ID law now under review by a trial judge, Pennsylvania officials announced Tuesday they would relax requirements for obtaining a photo ID.

While the law had initially required two documents with proof of residency to obtain a state-issued voting-only ID, individuals will now only need to provide their name, date of birth, social security number and address.

Commonwealth Secretary Carol Aichele said she believed the change would meet the standard set by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which sent the case back to the trial judge last week due to concern that the state’s implementation of the law could lead to widespread voter suppression.

In its opinion, the Pennsylvania high court said the state was not living up to its promise to ensure access to voter ID, and rejected the court’s “mere predictive judgment” that the law would not lead to disfranchisement:

In this regard, the court is to consider whether the procedures being used for deployment of the cards comport with the requirement of liberal access which the General Assembly attached to the issuance of PennDOT identification cards. If they do not, or if the Commonwealth Court is not still convinced in its predictive judgment that there will be no voter disenfranchisement arising out of the Commonwealth’s implementation of a voter identification requirement for purposes of the upcoming election, that court is obliged to enter a preliminary injunction.

Reports have been rampant of thwarted efforts to obtain voter ID, and the state’s last-minute fix does not address a range of other obstacles to achieving “no voter disenfranchisement,” including the state’s professed lack of resources and training to issue photo IDs to all of those lacking one before election day, its capacity to ensure transportation to driver’s license centers, and its ill-preparedness to educate residents about the ever-changing requirements before election day. By conservative estimates, the law could disfranchise as many as 750,000 state residents.

Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson’s original opinion upholding the law relied upon a flimsy nineteenth century decision that claimed that vote-suppressing laws may be permissible to protect against ‘rogues,’ ‘strumpets,’ and ‘wandering arabs.’ During oral argument Tuesday, Simpson signaled that he would issue some sort of injunction, saying, “I’m going to ask both sides what the injunction should look like.”