Oklahoma Judge Mike Norman has an unusual approach to sentencing — just don’t worry about the First Amendment:

Oklahoma Judge Mike Norman believes an alternative to incarceration is requiring people to attend church for a mandatory stretch of time. Norman has handed down church-related sentences several times. But it was his punishment of teenager Tyler Alred that captured national attention, and the opposition of civil libertarians.

Alred, 17, pled guilty to manslaughter after he drove his vehicle into a tree, killing a 16-year-old passenger, John Luke Dum. Alred had been drinking, but was not legally drunk. Because Alred was prosecuted as a youthful offender, Norman had more discretion in deciding the teen’s punishment.

The judge gave Alred a choice: he could avoid prison as long as he was willing to attend church for ten years, as well as complete high school, train as a welder, and give up alcohol, drugs and tobacco for one year.

Judge Norman deserves credit for offering alternatives to incarceration, which often does little more than destroy an individual’s ability to contribute productively to society. But including church attendance in a criminal sentence is simply not allowed. As conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy explained in Lee v. Weisman, “[i]t is beyond dispute that, at a minimum, the Constitution guarantees that government may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise.”

Norman’s sentence forces Alred to choose between participation in religion or being thrown in prison. That is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

After his voter suppression tactics landed in him court several times in the lead-up to the 2012 elections, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) proposed a new scheme to rig the 2012 elections. But following significant criticism for his idea to eliminate Ohio’s status as a swing state, he has backed off the idea.

Two days after the election, Husted said if the state wanted to avoid controversies like the ones he caused, it could change its laws to drop its winner-take-all status in presidential elections. Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and other Republicans in Pennsylvania had unsuccessfully proposed a similar scheme in 2011 to allocate electors based on who wins each gerrymandered Congressional district — and also found with significant opposition. Now, Husted is distancing himself from his own proposal.

In an interview with the Cincinnati Inquirer, Husted claimed his original remarks were “badly taken out of context” and that he does not intend to push such a change:

“My response was that as long as Ohio was a winner-take-all state and maybe the most important swing state in the country, there is no election system that won’t be controversial,” Husted said Wednesday. “I said if the sole goal was to make Ohio elections less controversial, you could fix redistricting so that districts are drawn fairly and more competitive, and then apportion our electoral votes according to congressional districts. That was just a comment, not a proposal.”

Husted added, “I’ve got enough on my plate that needs to be done. … This isn’t one of those things.” Just two small states — Maine and Nebraska — allocate their electors based on Congressional districts.

It is noteworthy that Husted — who fiercely opposed a ballot initiative to create a non-partisan redistricting process in Ohio — tacitly concedes that the Republican gerrymander of the state was not “drawn fairly.” Even though Ohioans voted to re-elect President Obama and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) statewide, the party won 12 of the state’s 16 Congressional seats in this year’s general elections.

Last month, a woman who accused Virginia inmate Johnathon Montgomery of sexually assaulting her when Montgomery was 14 and she was 10 completely recanted that testimony. A judge ordered Montgomery freed shortly thereafter at the urging of both the local prosecutors and Montgomery’s defense attorneys.

Yet, thanks to a quirk of Virginia law, Montgomery nearly lost his opportunity to spend this Thanksgiving with his family — Virginia law prevents lower court judges from issuing such orders more than 21 days after trial, and Montgomery spent nearly four years in prison.

To his credit, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) sidestepped this problem by granting Montgomery a conditional pardon allowing him to be freed before a court can act. Under McDonnell’s pardon, Montgomery must file a “writ of actual innocence” within 30 days of his release from prison. He also will remain on probation and will be forced to register as a sex offender pending further court action.

When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) proposed repealing a decades-old state law that allows citizens to register on Election Day, he said his motivation was to make the process easier for the state’s municipal election clerks.

To Walker’s surprise, one of the first major groups to push back on his proposal is the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association.

In fact, the organization’s election communications chairwoman Diane Hermann-Brown said, eliminating Election Day Registration would actually make their jobs significantly more difficult. The Wisconsin State Journal has more:

But the state’s municipal clerks — the ones who run elections — are not looking to be relieved of the extra work, said Diane Hermann-Brown, election communications chairwoman for the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks’ Association. In fact, eliminating the practice would create a “heavy burden” on municipalities and the state, said Hermann-Brown, who is the city clerk in Sun Prairie.

“There’s no way we’d be in favor of that,” she said.

Hermann-Brown pointed to a number of new election regulations that the state would be forced to adopt if it repealed Election Day Registration. For instance, clerks would be required to use provisional ballots, which can turn into a bureaucratic nightmare for election officials. State agencies, like the BMV, would be required to help register voters as well.

Walker’s announcement came just two weeks after Obama’s won the swing state of Wisconsin this month. Republicans won a handful of state Senate races the same day, giving the GOP control of both the legislature and the governorship.

There’s a very good reason why Walker and his Republican allies want to get rid of Election Day Registration. In Milwaukee, which has far more minorities than other areas of the state and gave 79 percent of its votes to Barack Obama, nearly 1 in 5 voters registered on Election Day. It was particularly popular among local college students at Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama.

Floridians endured election chaos and marathon voting lines this year, largely thanks to reduced early voting hours, voter purges, and voter registration restrictions pushed by Republican legislators. In an exclusive report by the Palm Beach Post, several prominent Florida Republicans are now admitting that these election law changes were geared toward suppressing minority and Democratic votes.

Former governor Charlie Crist (R-FL) and former GOP chairman Jim Greer (R-FL), as well as several current GOP members, told the Post that Republican consultants pushed the new measures as a way to suppress Democratic voters. Crist expanded early voting hours in 2008 despite party pressure, but Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) targeted early voting almost immediately when he took office in 2011. Scott’s administration claimed the new laws were meant to curb in-person voter fraud, despite the fact that an individual in Florida is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud.

Current party members and consultants confirmed the motive was not to stop voter fraud but to make it harder for Democrats and minorities to vote:

Wayne Bertsch, who handles local and legislative races for Republicans, said he knew targeting Democrats was the goal. “In the races I was involved in in 2008, when we started seeing the increase of turnout and the turnout operations that the Democrats were doing in early voting, it certainly sent a chill down our spines. And in 2008, it didn’t have the impact that we were afraid of. It got close, but it wasn’t the impact that they had this election cycle,” Bertsch said, referring to the fact that Democrats picked up seven legislative seats in Florida in 2012 despite the early voting limitations.

Another GOP consultant, who did not want to be named, also confirmed that influential consultants to the Republican Party of Florida were intent on beating back Democratic turnout in early voting after 2008.

[...]A GOP consultant who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution said black voters were a concern. “I know that the cutting out of the Sunday before Election Day was one of their targets only because that’s a big day when the black churches organize themselves,” he said.

Though the state ultimately went to President Obama, the Republican effort to suppress votes was largely successful. A post-election report found that new voting restrictions led to a huge increase in provisional ballots, which are cast when there is some question of the voter’s eligibility.

While crying voter fraud, the Florida GOP had to confront its own scandal when a voter registration firm they hired turned in hundreds of fraudulent registration forms in several Florida counties. The GOP hastily cut ties with the group when the state opened a criminal investigation into their operations.

Citing multiple court decisions declaring the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, the Judicial Council of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a lower federal court to reimburse a court employee’s husband for costs arising from the judiciary’s failure to provide the same-sex couple with equal benefits:

Christopher Nathan, 39, of San Francisco, a law clerk for U.S. Magistrate Maria Elena James, sought coverage for his spouse, Thomas Alexander, 40. The couple wed in 2008, in a ceremony performed by James, before Proposition 8 prohibited same-sex marriages in California.

When Nathan tried to enroll Alexander in the government’s insurance plan, he was turned down by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts because the 1996 law bars federal recognition of same-sex unions.

In April, Chief U.S. District Judge James Ware said the denial violated the federal court’s rules against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender, and ordered the court to reimburse Nathan for the costs of buying private insurance.

The Judicial Council, the final authority in the administrative review process, went a step further in this week’s order and said DOMA has been held unconstitutional by a San Francisco federal judge in another employee’s case. The three-judge panel ordered the court to determine how much it owes Nathan and then pay him within 10 days.

Although this is an administrative decision — and therefore does not have the precedential force that an actual judicial decision striking down DOMA would have — it is still an important sign that DOMA has fallen out of favor among federal judges. The Judicial Council of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is made up of 11 sitting federal judges, including 6 appellate judges.