When Karl Rove’s Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies (GPS) formed in 2010, it established its official address in Warrenton, VA, and registered with the Internal Revenue Service a tax-exempt 501(c)(4) “social welfare organization.” It apparently did not, however, register as a charitable organization with the Commonwealth of Virginia, as appears was legally required.

According to state code, non-profit groups that intend to solicit contributions must first register with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Office of Charitable and Regulatory Programs. Groups must pay an annual fee ($325 for groups raising over $1 million annually), provide basic information about their operations, and must sign statements affirming that no funds “have been or will knowingly be used, directly or indirectly, to benefit or provide support, in cash or in kind, to terrorists, terrorist organizations, terrorist activities, or the family members of any terrorist.”

The Virginia law explicitly exempts political campaign committees that are “required by state or federal law to file a report or statement of contributions and expenditures.” Crossroads GPS has consistently kept its contributors secret as it has raised and spent tens of millions of dollars against Democratic candidates.

While the group’s federal tax filings and registration with the District of Columbia indicate that it is a Virginia corporation — and Crossroads GPS did apparently register with the state’s corporation commission — the Office of Charitable and Regulatory Programs confirmed to ThinkProgress that no entity named Crossroads GPS or Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies has ever registered to solicit contributions in Virginia. Additionally, no entity with the tax identification number listed on Crossroads GPS’s tax filings has ever registered with the agency.

A spokesman for Crossroads GPS did not respond to a ThinkProgress request for comment.

With judicial nominations stalled by obstructionist Senate Republicans, and immigration and drug prosecutions skyrocketing, federal trial judges in states on the U.S.-Mexico border are facing criminal caseloads as much as 11.5 times the average, according to a new report.

In New Mexico, judges faced an average of 7,020 cases per judge since 2006, compared to Washington, D.C.’s 147. And in Texas, the caseloads throughout the state range from 5,467 to 3,872 per judge. The border states face such onerous caseloads in part due to an influx of immigration and drug prosecutions. The report by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University explains:

While apprehensions along the southwest border haven’t grown – indeed they generally have been falling for more than a decade or more – the onslaught of criminal immigration prosecutions that have engulfed federal district courts has occurred as a result of a policy shift to increase criminal prosecutions for illegal entry rather than use civil and administration procedures to remove and sanction individuals found to have illegally entered the U.S.

It is worth noting that these differences in criminal caseloads don’t fully reflect the comparative dockets of these courts. Some courts have much higher civil dockets relative to their criminal dockets. But the report notes that the variance in civil caseloads does not explain the difference. Even accounting for civil cases, for example, New Mexico still has twice the caseload per judgeship of the District of Columbia.

What’s more, onerous criminal caseloads are particularly troublesome, given the dire impact of a mistaken conviction or sentence by an overworked judge, who typically faces mandatory timelines for handling criminal cases. Unfortunately, judges in Texas and other border states have had to turn to shortcuts just to get by. In a 2011 interview with CNN, U.S. District Judge Royal Ferguson explained:

For one thing, you herd everybody into the courtroom and you start sentencing them just running down the row. That’s unacceptable. But if you don’t do that, if you take the normal time it would take to sentence people, your cases just back up to the point where it’s impossible to deal with them. The courts just get completely gridlocked and logjammed and nothing can happen. So at some point, judges have to make decisions, and they often have to make decisions on the border in an assembly-line fashion, which I think we all find unacceptable.

Ferguson’s comments were featured in a March 2011 CNN report on the “dire situation caused by a massive nominee logjam” on the federal courts. There were at the time 94 federal court vacancies. Now, even after the election, there remain 82 vacancies, including in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. Among the nominees is Rosemary Márquez, nominated more than a year ago to fill an Arizona seat considered a judicial emergency. Continued Republican intransigence has stalled any movement on nominees like Márquez.

“This is as bad as I’ve seen it,” D.C. District Court Chief Judge Royce Lamberth told CNN. “There’s a war between the legislative branches of government and the judiciary is caught in the middle and we are suffering.” Bills have been introduced in Congress to add additional seats in several of these states and alleviate their caseloads, but even that won’t matter if legislators can’t successfully fill the seats that are empty.

Since two states passed ballot initiatives last week to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana, the question on everyone’s mind has been how federal officials will respond, given that the federal Controlled Substances Act bans any marijuana possession or distribution. Although some uses of the drug will be legal under Colorado and Washington law, federal officials retain the right to prosecute individuals in those states, and they may even challenge the laws in court as preempted by the CSA.

But what if both the state and federal laws could happily coexist? Colorado’s Democratic members of Congress are working on a proposed amendment to the Controlled Substances Act that would enable states to legalize marijuana free from concerns about federal prosecutions. The Colorado Independent reports:

Congressional staffers told the Independent that Colorado Reps Diana DeGette (CD1), Ed Perlmutter (CD7) and Jared Polis (CD2) are working independently and together on bills that would exempt states where pot has been legalized from the Controlled Substances Act.[…]

[T]he lawmakers expect to gain support for their proposal on the Hill by working with the Washington State delegation, congressional representatives from medical marijuana states, as well as a broader coalition of representatives who believe in greater states’ rights or who support easing federal marijuana laws.

They added that the Democratic lawmakers will also reach out to Colorado’s two Democratic senators and its four Republican congressmen.

DeGette’s bill may be introduced as early as next week, according to a Denver Post editorial endorsing the proposal.

Commentator and talk show host David Sirota has started a petition calling on President Obama to support such a bill that has already garnered the 25,000 signatures needed for the petition to be reviewed by the White House, through the Obama administration’s “We the People” program.

Meanwhile, Reps. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Barney Frank (D-MA) sent a letter to President Obama urging his administration to refrain from prosecuting marijuana activity that would be legal under state law. This is the approach the Department of Justice had initially taken to medical marijuana laws. But the Department’s official position has since fluctuated, as it has become increasingly aggressive in prosecuting medical marijuana dispensaries. Paul and Frank are the sponsors of legislation that would completely remove criminal sanctions at the federal level for the use of marijuana.

In an interview with Milwaukee’s ABC affiliate, the Romney campaign’s Wisconsin co-chair, state Sen. Alberta Darling (R), suggested that her candidate would have won Wisconsin but for the fact that the state’s voter ID law was declared unconstitutional by a state court:

HOST: Do you think photo ID would have made any difference in the outcome of this election?

DARLING: Absolutely, I think so. We’re looking at all different kinds of precincts and all sorts of same-day registrations and I know people will go “oh, we don’t have fraud and abuse in our elections,” but what can’t we have voter ID when the majority of the people in Wisconsin wanted it. We passed it. The governor signed it. Why should one judge in Dane County be able to hold it up?

Watch it:

There is a simple answer to Darling’s question about why voter ID cannot exist in Wisconsin — the state constitution does not allow it. Under the Wisconsin Constitution, “[e]very United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state is a qualified elector of that district,” regardless of whether or not they have an ID.

But, more importantly, Darling’s suggestion that the only thing standing in between Romney and Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes was a law targeting the virtually non-existent problem of voter fraud at the polls is ridiculous. President Obama currently leads in Wisconsin by more than 200,000 votes. So Darling is suggesting that 200,000 people somehow managed to vote twice without anyone noticing — or perhaps that one person voted 200,001 times. Either one would require a conspiracy so massive it would make Fox Mulder blush.

In reality, a study of the 2004 election in Wisconsin found that of the approximately 3 million votes cast, “only seven were declared invalid—all of which were cast by felons who had finished their sentences and didn’t realize they were still barred from voting. As a result, Wisconsin’s overall fraud rate came in at a whopping 0.00023 percent.”

As President Obama said in his victory speech, far too many Americans waited in line for a very long time to vote this year and “we have to fix that.” Similarly, the candidates bombarded key states like Ohio and Florida, while ignoring concerns unique to voters in California or Mississippi. Election officials dreamed up new and increasingly creative ways to disenfranchise voters. Courts wrestled with state officials who, at times, even openly defied orders seeking to protect the vote. And partisan gerrymandering gave Republicans a House majority they did not earn and that the voters did not want. Here are five basic reforms that can be enacted before 2016 to fix many of the problems experienced during this year’s election:

1) Abolish The Electoral College

In a modern Democracy, there is simply no way to defend what happened in 2000, when the candidate rejected by the American people nonetheless became their president — albeit with an assist from five Supreme Court justices. Add to this the fact that the Electoral College offers copious opportunities for election rigging — such as Gov. Tom Corbett’s (R-PA) plan to give most of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to Romney no matter who won the state — or the possibility that some of the 538 people chosen as members of the Electoral College could give their votes to someone other than the winner of their state, and this relic from more than 200 years ago becomes completely bonkers.

Additionally, while voters in Ohio were undoubtedly sick of the parade of political advertisements that hit their state this election cycle, there is a very real advantage to being from a swing state — presidential candidates have an extra reason to listen to your concerns and will potentially make campaign promises that benefit your state. The flip side of this is that major cities like Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, the deep south (including many African-American population centers) and much of the Great Plains do not enjoy this same access to the next president. The President of the United States should be the president of all the United States, and a voter in Harlem should have the same opportunity to make their case to a presidential candidate as a voter in Pensacola.

Most importantly, however, the President of the United States should be the person that most Americans want to be President of the United States. The way to make this happen is to abolish (or at least, make irrelevant) the Electoral College, either through constitutional amendment or through the National Popular Vote compact.

2) Abolish Partisan Election Officials

As if Katherine Harris did not make this point perfectly clear in 2000, partisan state election officials proved over and over again in 2012 that neither party should be in control of collecting and counting votes. Yet this year brought Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s war on early voting, attempted voter purges in Florida, Colorado and Iowa, and top election officials touting laws that do little more than keep minorities, low-income and student voters from the polls.

A better alternative is the Wisconsin plan, where a nonpartisan Government Accountability Board made up of retired judges runs elections, not partisan officials beholden to a political party.

3) Eliminate Partisan Gerrymandering

Based on early vote totals, which admittedly could change before the final tallies are available, voters cast over half a million more votes for a Democratic House candidate than for a Republican House candidate in 2012. Yet Republicans will control the House largely due to the kind of partisan gerrymandering that allows President Obama to carry the state of Ohio, but Democrats to only carry a quarter of its House districts. This is both unacceptable and unconstitutional.

There are many proposals for how to end partisan gerrymandering, which range from non-partisan redistricting commissions to judge-drawn districts to proportional representation. One thing is clear, however, a system that allows one party to seize control of the House for up to a decade simply because it wins in a redistricting year has to go.

4) Allow All Voters To Register On Election Day

Same day registration is the law in Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, and it will soon be implemented in California as well. This basic reform can boost turnout by as much as 7 percent, and it should be the law nationwide. Congress could make it so tomorrow, at least with respect to Congressional elections, because the Constitution permits the United States to “at any time by law make or alter” a state’s election law.

5) Ensure Adequate Early Voting In All States

It should go without saying that when voters have to wait six hours or more in line to exercise their most fundamental right, that their state failed to provide them with adequate opportunities to exercise the franchise. Yet lawmakers and election officials in the key states of Ohio and Florida fought tooth and nail to cut the number of days when voters could cast an early ballot. Their electorates paid for it this year with unacceptably long lines — the kind that actively discourage people from waiting to cast a ballot. This performance must not be repeated in 2016.