Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted is fast becoming one of the most despised election officials in the country for his many attempts to restrict early voting and throw out legitimate provisional ballots. He’s also alienating federal judges left and right. After Husted issued a last-minute directive that could invalidate thousands of Ohioans’ votes, US District Judge Algenon Marbley did not bother to hide his impatience with the secretary’s hijinks.

Husted’s directive, which was issued at 7 pm on the Friday before the election, openly defies Ohio state law by shifting the burden of correctly filling in a provisional ballot form from the poll worker to the contested voter. As Andrew Cohen at the Atlantic explains, Judge Marbley had already worked out an agreement that placed the responsibility on poll workers and the state, so a vote would still be counted if the poll worker made an error. Husted’s directive snuck around this agreement, apparently infuriating the judge:

THE COURT: Mr. Epstein, would you agree that voting is the linchpin of our democracy?

[STATE ATTORNEY] MR. EPSTEIN: Yes, Your Honor.

THE COURT: I do too. What concerned me about the 2012-54 directive is that it was filed on a Friday night at 7 p.m. The first thought that came to mind was democracy dies in the dark. So, when you do things like that that seeks to avoid transparency, it appears, then that gives me great pause but even greater concern. So, if anyone I’m going to give additional time to, it’s going to be you, Mr. Epstein, because you have a lot of explaining to do [...] I’m really trying to get to the root of this, and I don’t want to see democracy die in the darkness on my watch, especially with voting. You know I have a special place for voting.

Ohio’s attorney was unable to point to any legal justification for ignoring the law and shifting the burden to the voter. Marbley exploded:

THE COURT: So show me where it is. Show me where it’s meant. Show me the legislative history. Show me the facts that the secretary used to make the decision to change this directive at seven o’clock on a Friday night on the eve of an election. I want to see it, and I want to see it now. Show it to me.

MR. EPSTEIN: Your Honor, I have no legislative history to present to the Court.

Marbley isn’t the first federal judge to be provoked by Husted’s defiance. After another district judge, Judge Peter Economus, ruled that Ohio must restore early voting hours on the three days before the election, Husted forbade the local election boards from following the court order. Husted backed down when the judge issued a terse order that demanded he appear in court to personally explain himself.

Marbley’s ruling is expected Monday. Provisional ballots will be counted on November 17.

Over the past two years, state legislators affiliated with the controversial American Legislative Exchange Council mounted a furious push to enact strict vote-suppressing voter ID laws. But while advocates claimed these laws are necessary to prevent voter impersonation fraud, two arrests Tuesday demonstrate that the opposite is true.

Talking Points Memo reports two Republican voters attempted to “test” whether they could commit voter fraud in New Mexico and Nevada. Neither state requires identification to vote, but both discovered that that does not equate to voter fraud being legal — or easily committed.

In Nevada, 56-year-old Roxanne Rubin, a Republican, was arrested on Nov. 2 for allegedly trying to vote twice, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. The newspaper quoted a report by an investigator with the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office that said Rubin “was unhappy with the process; specifically in that her identification was not checked.” … She was arrested at the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and charged with a category “D” felony.

On Tuesday in New Mexico, a Republican poll watcher was taken into police custody after also apparently trying to test the system. According to the Las Cruces Sun-News, the man voted, then obtained a second provisional ballot and announced he was simply “testing the system to see if people could get away with voting twice.”

There are many reasons why in person voter fraud — the “problem” these voter ID laws purport to solve — is virtually non-existent. Most people accept the principle of “one person, one vote” and don’t try to cheat the system because doing so is morally wrong. Others recognize that doing so is illegal and do not want to risk being charged with a category “D” felony. And with more than 121 million votes cast in Tuesday’s presidential election, voting twice would be a hugely inefficient way to influence the election.

While polls initially showed statewide support a voter ID measure in Minnesota, once voters learned that such a measure was unnecessary (no one has ever been convicted of voter impersonation in the state’s history), would create hurdles that could keep citizens from voting, and would potentially cost the state millions, it failed with nearly 54 percent of voters refusing to back the effort.

In an interview with CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield earlier today, Florida’s Republican Secretary of State Rick Detzner tried to defend his states dysfunctional election process, which led voters waiting up to six hours in line just to cast their vote. Indeed, as Banfield told Detzner, she spoke to many voters who “tried twice to vote early,” but had to abandon those attempts due to long lines, only to wait another three hours to vote on election day. Yet Detzner appeared completely without remorse for the widespread barriers to voting he presided over.

In what was perhaps the most significant exchange, Banfield asked whether Detzner regrets a Florida law rolling back the number of days when voters could cast an early ballot. Detzner was unremorseful:

BANFIELD: Look, you all decided, with a Republican legislature to cut the early voting days from 14 to 8. For whatever reason you did that, do you regret making that choice, so that all of those people who didn’t get to the polls early stuck themselves in line and wound up waiting so long that many people walked away and were disenfranchised?

DETZNER: Well, let me point out that, while the days were cut, the number of hours were not. We still maintained 96 hours of voting, and it created greater flexibility for the supervisors. Uh, for the first time ever voters could vote during the day for 12 hours during the day, and I can tell you I heard feedback from voters going into election day that they liked the opportunity to vote either in the morning before work or after work. And frankly, I think the turnout is a good representation of the fact that people liked the voting hours and the flexibility that the supervisors had.

Watch it:

There is something truly absurd about Detzner’s claim that the fact that people did not decide to give up their most fundamental right somehow reflects their satisfaction with a massive failure of governance. It should go without saying that when someone has to wait six hours to cast a ballot, their government failed them, and no amount of spin can defend a decision not to make more opportunities to vote available. As Florida’s former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist said last Sunday, Gov. Rick Scott’s (R-FL) refusal to extend early voting is “unconscionable” and “the only thing that makes any sense as to why this is happening and being done is voter suppression.”

Crist is almost undoubtedly correct. The Obama campaign made early voting a key prong of their turnout strategy, and many low-income voters who tend to vote Democratic are disenfranchised without early voting because they lack the job flexibility to cast a ballot on election day.

Up until the passage of two initiatives Tuesday to legalize and regulate marijuana in Washington and Colorado, federal officials had remained quiet, declining to weigh in on the partial legalization of a product that is federally illegal.

But on Wednesday, both the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration issued their first public statements in reaction, and they were both exactly the same:

The department’s enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act remains unchanged. In enacting the Controlled Substances Act, Congress determined that marijuana is a Schedule I controlled substance. We are reviewing the ballot initiatives and have no additional comment at this time.

While this statement is mostly a punt that communicates little about what the federal government plans to do, it is definitively a milder message than Attorney General Eric Holder sent in 2010, when he warned prior to the failure of a similar California initiative that he “strongly opposed” the initiative and would “vigorously enforce” federal drug law against those in compliance with the state law.

Among the questions left unanswered by this statement are: Will the DOJ file a lawsuit challenging the laws in their entirety, as former Obama drug advisor Kevin Sabet has suggested? Will it take the stance the DOJ once took on medical marijuana that it would not target those in compliance with state law?

The DOJ’s position on medical marijuana enforcement has fluctuated, with messages coming out of House Judiciary Committee testimony and a 60 Minutes segment that conflict with a 2011 memo that suggested only individuals, and not dispensaries, would be exempt from prosecution. Meanwhile, the Department’s approach to enforcement at medical marijuana dispensaries in particular states has been increasingly aggressive. In California, the DOJ is continuing its case against the nation’s largest dispensary, Harborside Health Center, and recently took its crackdown to Los Angeles, where it filed complaints against three dispensaries and sent warning letters to 67 others.

It is hard to believe that the Department of Justice would take a softer approach to recreational marijuana than it has to medical marijuana, but it is possible that these laws and the public support they symbolize may prompt the DOJ to again reconsider its position. After all, as the DOJ has already learned from the growth of the medical marijuana industry in Colorado, enforcing federal drug law in a state with a burgeoning state-sanctioned industry is a whole different ballgame. What’s more, there are likely to be some changes of leadership in a second Obama administration that may well impact enforcement approaches. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday that he is considering stepping down in Obama’s second term.

Last year, Pennsylvania’s Republican Gov. Tom Corbett proposed rigging the Electoral College vote in his state through a plan that would have given the majority of the state’s electors to Romney even after President Obama carried the state. Under Corbett’s plan, the winner of each congressional district within Pennsylvania would receive a single electoral vote, and the overall winner of the state would receive an additional two electoral votes. Had this plan been in place last Tuesday, Mitt Romney would likely have won 13 of the state’s 20 electoral votes, despite losing the state overall by more than five points.

Corbett’s election-rigging plan died, largely because Republican members of Congress in Pennsylvania feared that it would cause the Obama campaign to shift resources into their districts and endanger their own chances of being reelected. Now, however, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R)– who spent much of 2012 inventing ways to prevent pro-Obama votes from being cast or counted — wants to revive this election rigging scheme. According to the Ohio political blog Plunderbund,

Husted’s solution to this perceived problem of Democrats and the national media picking on him? He says we should make Ohio less important in the election by dividing up our electoral votes by Congressional district.

This is huge and should raise giant red flags. Under the current winner-take-all system, Obama won all 18 of Ohio’s electoral votes. Under Husted’s plan, 12 of those 18 electoral votes would be handed to Mitt Romney, the popular vote loser.

As in Pennsylvania, Republicans gerrymandered Ohio within an inch of its life. Even though Obama won Ohio, Republicans carried 12 of 16 seats in Ohio’s House delegation. This gerrymander would have all but ensured that Romney carried the overwhelming majority of Ohio’s electoral votes, regardless of how he performed in the state overall.

Indeed, if the Corbett/Husted plan to rig the Electoral College had been law in several key Republican-controlled states that President Obama won last Tuesday, America would now be looking at a very different future. Assuming that Mitt Romney won every congressional district that elected a Republican House candidate in these key states, the Corbett/Husted plan would have given Romney 17 electoral votes in Florida, 9 in Michigan, 12 in Ohio, 13 in Pennsylvania, 8 in Virginia, and 5 in Wisconsin — for a total of 64 additional electoral votes.

Add those 64 votes to the 206 votes Romney won legitimately, and it adds up to exactly 270 — the amount he needed to win the White House.

When Democrats tried to get the DREAM Act and a path to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants through Congress in 2010, Republicans blocked the immigration reform measure in the Senate. But after a campaign in which GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney staked out harsh anti-immigration positions, and with President Obama winning 75 percent of Latino voters, several key leaders in the Republican party are coming out in favor of immigration reform:

• House Speaker John Boehner (OH): Saying the issue has been around for far too long, Boehner said in an ABC interview that “I’m confident that the president, myself, others can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.”
• Former Gov. Haley Barbour (MS): Haley argued on the “Today” show that Republicans need to be in favor of good policy. “And good policy on immigration in the United States is, we are in a global battle for capital and labor, and we need to have what is good economic policy for America on immigration because we do need labor,” he said. “We not only need Ph.Ds in science and technology, we need skilled workers and we need unskilled workers. And we need to have an immigration policy that is good economic policy, and then — and then the politics will take care of itself.”
• Radio host Sean Hannity: On his radio show Thursday, Hannity told his listeners that he has “evolved” on immigration policy and now supports a “pathway to citizenship.” The problem can’t go on, he added. “It’s simple to me to fix it,” Hannity said. “I think you control the border first. You create a pathway for those people that are here — you don’t say you’ve got to go home. And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because, you know what, it’s got to be resolved. The majority of people here, if some people have criminal records you can send them home, but if people are here, law-abiding, participating for years, their kids are born here, you know, first secure the border, pathway to citizenship, done.”

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), who is running for the chairmanship of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told Politico that Republicans will have to change how they reach out to Latino voters. “In some fashion, the way we have dealt with immigration gives us a black eye. And we need to figure out how to talk about issues and pursue policies that matter to Latino, Hispanic voters,” he said. And that’s clear from the exit poll results. Among Latino voters, immigration was the second most important issue behind jobs. Sixty percent of Latinos in the U.S. know someone who is an undocumented immigrant, and 90 percent are within two generations of immigrating to the U.S. After Romney spent most of his campaign embracing harmful immigration policies, most Latino voters reported that they thought Romney was “hostile toward Latinos,” while 66 percent said they believe Obama “truly cares about Latinos.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Senate Immigration, Refugees and Border Security Subcommittee, described it as a “breakthrough” that Boehner is willing to work on immigration reform, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (NV) has vowed to pass an immigration law. But other GOP congressional members have been resistant to reform in the past — House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) previously has promised to not hold a hearing on the DREAM Act — so it has yet to be seen if more Republicans will come around on immigration reform as well.