Voting lines of more than six hours during the November 2012 election likely deterred hundreds of thousands of Florida voters from casting a ballot, according to a new academic analysis of data compiled by the Orlando Sentinel. The analysis by Ohio State University Professor Theodore Allen finds that at least 201,000 people in 25 of the largest Florida counties ”likely gave up in frustration” because of longer lines – and Allens calls that a conservative estimate:

“My gut is telling me that the real number [of voters] deterred is likely higher,” Allen said. “You make people wait longer, they are less likely to vote.” […]

Said Jennifer Bitz, who said she waited more than five hours to vote at her Cape Coral precinct, “I must have seen 15 people, at least, just give up and leave off the line. I was absolutely livid. People [in line] were saying it was some sort of conspiracy.”

Lee County, where she lives, ranked worst in the Sentinel analysis. Its last precinct didn’t close until 2:54 a.m. Wednesday — nearly eight hours late. In all, 54 percent of the county’s voters were in precincts that stayed open past 8:30 p.m — and half, or 27 percent, voted in precincts still open at 10 p.m.

After Gov. Rick Scott slashed early voting days from 14 to eight and pushed through other voter suppression initiatives, several top Republicans admitted the purpose of the election law changes was to keep Democrats from the polls. To some extent, it had the desired effect. Although the laws did not prevent Obama from winning Florida’s electoral votes, Allen’s analysis found that those deterred by long lines would have voted for Obama by a margin of 15,000 votes. This conclusion matches another earlier study by Allen of just central Florida voters, which found that long lines cost Obama an 11,000-vote margin and likely deterred some 49,000 voters in just that region.

While Scott had initially defended his commitment to slashing early voting, he about-faced in the wake of a plunging post-election approval rating. Scott is now publicly supporting an expansion to the early voting days he cut, in addition to other measures intended to reduce the suppression he helped perpetuate.

Reaffirming his support for comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, President Obama said during his inaugural address, “Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity.” And based on recent polls, Americans agree with the president’s immigration reform push.

Most recently, a new SEIU/America’s Voice poll shows that 73 percent of people polled support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants over deportation. The latest poll from the Associated Press-GfK found that 62 percent of Americans favor allowing undocumented immigrants to eventually become citizens, up from about 50 percent in 2010. Much of the increase in support comes from Republicans, with 53 percent of Republicans surveyed saying they back the idea.

And the latest CNN poll shows that 53 percent of people surveyed said the federal government should have a plan that allows undocumented immigrants to become legal residents. Two years ago, though, 55 percent reported that deporting undocumented immigrants should be the government’s focus. The CNN poll mirrors the findings of an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey released last week.

Providing a road map to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. would have sweeping benefits for the nation, especially the economy. The sign polls continue to show that a majority of Americans support this policy should be a clear message to congressional leaders that they need to act on an immigration reform bill that creates a path to citizenship.

In a subcommittee vote Wednesday, Virginia State Sen. and former Republican National Committee Chief Counsel Jill Holtzman Vogel (R) abstained on a key vote on a bill to rig the state’s electoral college vote. The bill advanced (on a three-to-three party-line vote) to the full Committee on Privileges and Elections, without recommendation.

National Republicans, frustrated with their failure to win the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, are pushing to change the electoral allocations only in states Obama carried. With control of the state governments in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and elsewhere, they are hoping to pass legislation to ensure that most of those states’ electors go to their 2016 nominee — even if he or she does not carry those states.

Sen. Charles “Bill” Carrico Sr. (R) is the author of Senate Bill 723, which would allocate Virginia’s 13 electoral votes by congressional district, rather than the current winner-take-all system. With the state’s GOP-gerrymandered Congressional districts, Republicans hold eight of the 11 Virginia House districts. Even though President Obama won Virginia by four points, under this plan vast majority of Virginia’s electors would have gone to loser Mitt Romney.

Though the Privileges and Elections committee is also Republican controlled — an eight-to-seven majority — the 40 member Senate is evenly divided, with Republican Lt. Governor Bill Bolling breaking ties. Assuming the bill passes from the full committee and comes up on the floor, if all 20 Democrats vote against it and Vogel abstains again, it will fail.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) became one of the most notorious election officials in the country after his many attempts to restrict voting and discard ballots. Husted banned evening and weekend voting hours in all 88 boards of election, in spite of multiple counties‘ requests to stay open to accommodate people who could not leave their jobs to vote. The 2012 election was the first time election boards were not allowed to set their own hours.

A new report by the Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates found that these uniform voting hours created longer waits in urban counties. Residents of cities like Columbus experienced marathon lines on the last day of early voting. Even though more people turned out to vote in smaller counties than did in urban counties, rural Ohioans experienced little to no wait to vote:

Waiting times for in person voting during the last 3 days before election day was related to the number of voters, and even more so to county population: mostly less than 0.5 to 1.0 hour in almost all counties sampled with less than 160,000 population, but between 1-4 hours in all sampled counties with populations over 160,000. Therefore, the statewide uniform rules limiting weekend days, hours, and sites available for in-person voting resulted in unacceptably long waiting times for in-person voters in larger counties.

The report calls for greater flexibility in voting hours based on each county’s needs. Husted initially stepped in to break the partisan tie over expanding early voting hours in Ohio’s largest counties, creating a discrepancy between limited hours in traditionally Democratic counties and expanded hours in their Republican counterparts. After public outcry, Husted issued his directive restricting hours in all counties. He was ultimately forced to open the last weekend before the election to early voters by a court order.

When the directive was implemented, one Republican official in Columbus freely admitted that the restrictive voting schedule would hinder “urban — read African American” voters. The NOVA report notes that voters in urban counties heavily used weekend and evening hours in the last 2-3 weeks of the 2008 election.

There have already been five school shootings since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary, including the shooting yesterday at the Texas Lone Star Community College campus. Lawmakers’ reactions have varied from passing gun violence prevention measures to adopting the National Rifle Association-led initiative to eliminate gun-free zones in schools.

Now, Maine Sen. David Burns (R) is proposing legislation to allow teachers and other school officials to carry concealed weapons, after taking a training course and psychological exam. Burns’ proposal follows other bills popping up around the country to turn teachers into gun carriers, and even one South Carolina bill that would create a gun class for high school students.

These initiatives will inevitably lead to more harm than safer schools, like an armed guard leaving his gun in a student bathroom. Turning teachers into armed citizens is also exactly the opposite of what most Americans want in the wake of Newtown, according to an AP-GfK poll showing 58 percent Americans want stricter anti-gun violence laws.

At the opening of the last Congress, House and Senate Republicans lined up behind a Tea Party “balanced budget amendment” that would have made it functionally impossible to raise taxes while simultaneously forcing spending cuts so severe that they would “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.” Every single Republican in the senate co-sponsored this depression-inducing constitutional amendment.

Two years and one election later, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) reintroduced a version of the Tea Party amendment in the new Congress — but Lee is now a lone voice crying in the wilderness. According to Thomas, the Library of Congress’ searchable database of federal legislation, Lee’s proposed amendment has zero co-sponsors.

It’s worth noting that Lee has, at times, called national child labor laws, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, and even Medicare and Social Security unconstitutional. Meaning that every senator who does not believe that preventing children from working in coal mines is a violation of our founding document appears to have abandoned the quest to also turn that document into a blueprint for the Great Depression.

Yesterday, when Virginia state Sen. Henry Marsh (D) was away from the state capitol to attend President Obama’s inauguration, Virginia Republicans rushed through a gerrymandering bill that that could potentially transform the evenly divided Virginia senate into a 27-13 Republican majority. The Virginia senate is currently split 20-20 between Democrats and Republicans, and Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R) indicated that he would have opposed the gerrymander if given the tiebreaking vote. Thus the bill would not have passed if Republicans had not used Sen. Marsh’s absence to push it through when a key opposing vote was absent.

This is not an isolated incident. A memo from the Republican State Leadership Committee openly bragged that U.S. House Republicans kept their majority because of gerrymandering, and, indeed, these gerrymanders were so effective that Democratic House candidates would need to win the national popular vote by more than 7 points in order to take back the chamber. Meanwhile, top Republicans are also pushing a plan to rig future presidential elections by reallocating electoral votes in blue states to the Republican candidates for president.

Nevertheless, it is not certain that the Virginia GOP’s underhanded move to gerrymander the state senate will survive contact with the courts or the Department of Justice. Although the fate of any challenge to this partisan gerrymander is uncertain, here are four ways the gerrymander could still go down:

• No Mid-Decade Gerrymanders: The Virginia Constitution provides that “[t]he General Assembly shall reapportion the Commonwealth into electoral districts in accordance with this section in the year 2011 and every ten years thereafter.” When a constitution specifically instructs a legislature to take a particular action or grants a specific power to those lawmakers, courts sometimes read it to implicitly prevent them from taking other actions. Thus, when the state constitution instructs Virginia lawmakers to redistrict every ten years, it implicitly instructs them not to engage in mid-decade gerrymanders, and the new maps are invalid. The Virginia Supreme Court has not weighed in on this question, but a Virginia trial court concluded in 2012 that one purpose of this provision in the state constitution was “to preclude ‘politically convenient redistricting whenever one political party or the other might gain the upper hand and find it attractive to redraw political boundaries to consolidate power.’”
• Voting Rights Act: The Voting Rights Act not only forbids state voting laws which have a discriminatory impact on minorities, Section Five of the Act also requires new voting laws in some parts of the county to “pre-clear” those requirements with the Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington, DC before they can take effect. Much of Virginia remains subject to Section Five, so the maps could be stopped if they diminish minority voting strength in the covered areas. There’s only one problem: the conservatives on the Roberts Court are widely expected to strike down Section Five before the Court adjourns this June.
• What’s Left Of The Voting Rights Act: Even if the conservative justices strike down Section Five, Section Two of the Voting Right Act still prohibits redistricting that dilutes minority voting strength. To the extent that the new GOP maps dilute the minority vote, they could be subject to a lawsuit under Section Two. Such a lawsuit, however, would ultimately appeal to the same Republican-dominated Supreme Court that is expected to strike down Section Five.
• The U.S. Supreme Court Could Actually Do It’s Job: As a final note, the entire purpose of partisan gerrymanders is to weaken the voting power of people who hold one viewpoint (in this case, Democrats) while strengthening that of people who hold an opposing view (in this case, Republicans). This is a textbook violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition on viewpoint discrimination. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court’s conservatives have refused to even consider cases challenging partisan gerrymanders, although Justice Kennedy suggested that his opposition to gerrymandering lawsuits is not entirely absolute.

For nearly two years, House Republicans paid conservative superlawyer Paul Clement $520 an hour to defend the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in federal court — and then sent the bill to the American taxpayer. In total Clement has now cost the American people up to $3 million for his efforts on behalf of this unconstitutional law. Last night, we taxpayers finally found out what we were paying for — a 60 page brief explaining why the justices should leave marriage discrimination untouched.

As decades of precedent establish that the Constitution should provide a shield to minority groups when prejudice leaves them without adequate recourse to the political process, Clement includes a section discussing just how very powerful and completely capable of vindicating their rights at the ballot box gay men and lesbians have become. Same-sex marriage is supported by President Obama and Vice President Biden! Less than half of Congress filed a brief agreeing with them! A magazine once wrote an article about how influential the Human Rights Campaign is! For the first time in history, an entire 1 percent of the Senate is openly gay!

After touting the immense political clout of a group that, after 226 years of American democracy, finally managed to elect a single person to the upper house of Congress, Clement then drops this line:

In short, gays and lesbians are one of the most influential, best-connected, best-funded, and best organized interest groups in modern politics, and have attained more legislative victories, political power, and popular favor in less time than virtually any other group in American history. . . . Gays and lesbians not only have the attention of lawmakers, they are winning many legislative battles. And the importance of this factor in the analysis cannot be gainsaid. . . . [G]iven that the ultimate inquiry focuses on whether a group needs the special intervention of the courts or whether issues should be left for the democratic process, the political strength of gays and lesbians in the political process should be outcome determinative here.

One can only wonder what Paul Clement might have written if Virginia had hired him to defend their practice of racial marriage discrimination when it was before the justices in 1967. “Negro leaders meet often with the President and with Congressional leaders, and indeed, President Johnson himself signed two major laws pushed by the Negro lobby. Negro groups not only led a widely attended rally on the National Mall, but they routinely organize well-attended sit-ins, marches and other events that garner press attention and national sympathy. Recently, a Negro march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama even sparked the President of the United States to give a speech endorsing the Negro lobby’s agenda before a joint session of Congress.”

Because, of course, if the fact that gay people have won a few political battles lately were reason to deny them the equal protection of the laws, then the same would also be true about African-Americans and women. Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act two years before Virginia lost its marriage discrimination case in the Supreme Court. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 promised equal treatment to women in the workplace — a promise still denied to gay men and lesbians — seven years before the justices first recognized that official discrimination against women violates the Constitution. Political victories do not cancel out Americans’ constitutional rights, they augment them, and Clement is simply wrong to suggest otherwise.

Ultimately, the sheer absurdity of Clement’s argument exposes why his claims must not prevail at the Supreme Court. The Constitution of Seneca Falls and Selma is also the Constitution of Stonewall. Clement’s argument would deny all three.

Welcome to Justiceline, ThinkProgress Justice’s morning round-up of the latest legal news and developments. Remember to follow us on Twitter at @TPJustice

• Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) delayed a vote on filibuster reform in the hopes of negotiating a bipartisan deal to reform the chamber’s broken rules.
• A second Texas lawmaker introduces a second unconstitutional Texas bill to nullify federal gun laws.
• Best Western, Ramada, Days Inn, Super 8, Travelodge and Howard Johnson all give discounts to NRA members. Supporters of gun safety are trying to change that.
• The Supreme Court held that hospitals cannot reopen Medicare reimbursement claims that are more than a quarter century old.
• And, finally, everything about Justice Sotomayor’s appearance on the Daily Show was awesome:

  The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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