Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) has finally closed the investigation into possible voter fraud in the 2012 election, declaring, “voter fraud does exist, but it is not an epidemic.”

To illustrate his point, Husted noted that the 135 cases of possible voter fraud referred for further investigation are a tiny percentage of more than 5.6 million votes cast in the presidential election last November. Most of these cases involved people who tried to double-vote by either voting in two different precincts or sending an absentee ballot and then showing up at the polls. According to a Cincinnati Enquirer report, most of these voters were not trying to swing the election illegally, but were worried their ballots got lost in the mail or followed incorrect instructions from poll workers.

Husted emphasized the fact that the safeguards in the voting system prevented these people from actually getting both their votes counted, as most cast one or more provisional ballots. Provisional ballots are used if there is some question regarding the voter’s eligibility, and are often discarded even if the voter is legitimate.

Conservative groups searching for compelling evidence of in-person voter fraud have seized on Ohio’s investigation as proof that voting restrictions, like strict voter ID laws, are necessary. Before the election, Husted toyed with supporting a strict voter ID law pushed by Republican lawmakers, but ultimately dropped it despite enthusiastic Republican support. After the voter fraud investigation, however, Husted observed that “a photo ID wouldn’t have mattered in most of these cases.”

However, the Secretary was quick to note that the investigation uncovered no evidence of voter suppression. Husted became one of the most notorious election officials of 2012 due to his multiple attempts to bend the law and restrict early voting hours despite multiple counties’ requests to stay open to accommodate residents. A report after the election determined that Husted’s early voting restrictions created much longer lines for urban voters than those in suburban or rural areas. Though Husted is claiming there was no formal evidence of voter suppression, the marathon lines endured by thousands of voters in Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati speak for themselves.

Last November, Florida voters endured massive lines and chaotic polling places largely thanks to a barrage of election law changes pushed by Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) and other GOP lawmakers. Republicans slashed the number of early voting days in half, changed ballot length restrictions to add lengthy and frivolous constitutional amendments to 12-page ballots, restricted voter registration, and tried to purge mostly minority voters from the voting rolls.

On Wednesday, Scott signed a bill to reverse his own election laws by restoring early voting days and ballot limits, among other measures.

Though Scott initially insisted he “did the right thing” by implementing these laws, vehement backlash and plummeting approval ratings prompted the governor to embrace election reforms:

The new bill extends early voting from 8 days to 14, extends early voting hours from 8 to 12 hours a day, and expands polling places to include courthouses, civic centers, stadiums, convention centers, fairgrounds and government-owned senior and community centers to keep up with crowds.

It also seeks to make ballot length more manageable by restricting constitutional amendments to a maximum of 75 words, and loosens some of the restrictions on when voters have to file provisional ballots.

It also permits county supervisors to hold early voting on the Sunday before the election, “respecting the ‘souls to the polls’ tradition of many black churches,” as reported by the Florida Current.

The bill moves back Florida’s primary elections from January to the first Tuesday allowed by Democratic and Republican National Committees to avoid penalties.

And lastly, the bill imposes $25,000 fines for failing to fix voting machines, something that reportedly snarled elections in Palm Beach County, according to the Sun Sentinel.

Shortly after the election, prominent GOP members admitted many of the new election laws intentionally tried to make it harder for Democrats to vote. These vote-suppressing efforts largely succeeded; the long lines discouraged at least 201,000 Floridians from voting, while black and Latino voters waited nearly twice as long as whites.

Yesterday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) vetoed a bill that would have allowed in-person early voting in his state for 14 days prior to elections. Christie’s veto statement claimed that expanding the franchise in this way would be too expensive and also that early voting “risks the integrity and orderly administration of our elections by introducing a new voting method and process.” He also claims that the state’s current system allowing early voters to vote by mail is sufficient.

Christie’s claim that limiting early voting to mail in ballots will preserve the “integrity” of elections is, if anything, the opposite of true. According to the New York Times, mailed ballots are “less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.” Moreover, while in-person voter fraud is virtually non-existent, fraud in mailed ballots is “vastly more prevalent.”

There is another possible explanation for Christie’s veto, however. One empirical study shows that voters who vote by mail are “more likely to be Republicans” and another shows that they are more likely to be “politically conservative.” Admittedly, there is also a study from the 1990s claiming that in-person earlier voters tend to be demographically similar to voters who vote by mail, but it is likely that this study’s findings have been displaced by events. The Obama campaigns made turning out early voters to the polls a major focus of their get out the vote effort, and voter drives that bring black voters to the polls on early voting days are now common in African-American churches.

Remember the six hour lines Florida voters faced in order to case a ballot last November? The ones that led to at least 200,000 voters giving up and going home without casting a ballot, according to one study? Those lines did not happen by accident. They happened because Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a law that nearly cut in half the number of early voting days in his state, as part of his broader efforts to make it harder to vote in Florida.

Scott faced such a severe backlash from his efforts to suppress the vote that even he won’t admit that he supported the anti-voter bills he signed into law. Nevertheless, even after the long lines and the backlash, a top North Carolina Republican wants to bring Scott’s vision to North Carolina. A bill introduced last week by North Carolina’s Republican House Majority Leader Edgar Starnes would “shorten the length of time for early voting, prohibit voting on Sunday, abolish same-day registration at early voting sites, and end straight-ticket voting.”

It’s not difficult to understand why Republicans are so keen on limiting early voting and making it harder to register. As the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit explained in a decision striking down the Ohio GOP’s new limits on early voting, “early voters have disproportionately lower incomes and less education than election day voters” — lower income voters tend to favor Democrats over Republicans — and without early voting “thousands of voters who would have voted . . . will not be able to exercise their right to cast a vote in person.” Indeed, several Florida Republicans openly admitted that Rick Scott’s limits on early voting were enacted because “the increase of turnout and the turnout operations that the Democrats were doing in early voting . . . sent a chill down our spines.”

Prohibiting early voting on Sunday is a direct attack on African-American turnout, as many black churches lead turnout drives on the Sunday before Election Day. Indeed, the Palm Beach Post quoted one GOP consultant in Florida admitting that “the cutting out of the Sunday before Election Day was one of [GOP lawmakers'] targets only because that’s a big day when the black churches organize themselves.” According to one poll, 96 percent of black voters supported President Obama.

New Jersey is one of a dwindling number of states that doesn’t allow its residents to cast in-person votes prior to Election Day. That could change for the Garden State with a stroke of Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) pen.

Late last week, the State Assembly passed S 2364 by a 46-31 vote, following the Senate’s 24-16 approval. The bill would open polling places for 15 days before Election Day, giving residents flexibility to cast a ballot at their convenience. However, Christie has yet to take a position on the matter, and some prognosticators suspect he’ll veto the bill.

New Jersey currently allows citizens to mail in a ballot early, but there’s still a strong need for in-person early voting, as the New Jersey Star-Ledger explains:

The vote was mostly along party lines, which could indicate the governor is unlikely to sign the legislation.

Under the bill, polling places would be open all week, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Mondays through Saturdays, and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sundays. The cost of the program is estimated at $22 million, although sponsors said it could be done more cheaply without buying costly new equipment.

Democrats say voting complications caused by Hurricane Sandy demonstrate the need for the program.

Early voting is an important and popular voting reform that arose primarily after the 2000 presidential election debacle. Now, all but 16 states offer some form of early voting. Americans take advantage of the option, too; around one-third of all voters now cast their ballots before Election Day, including nearly 80 percent in some states like Colorado.

Last November, Minnesota voters replaced Republican majorities in the state Senate and House of Representatives with new majorities from the Democratic Farm Labor Party (DFL), Minnesota’s Democratic Party. But as the popularly elected Democratic majority prepares important legislation to make it easier for Minnesotans to vote, Gov. Mark Dayton (DFL) has decided to give the Republican minority the power to block the effort if it is not to their liking.

The MinnPost notes that Dayton has said he will not sign any election reform bill that does not garner bipartisan support in the legislature. House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt (R) boasted Friday that the governor’s move “gives us a little bit of power, too — almost like a veto. If we don’t put any Republican votes up, he’s pledged to veto that stuff.” Daudt hits the nail on the head: a veto is precisely what Dayton is giving the Minnesota Republicans.

Minnesota Republicans have stood unanimously against the majority’s proposals to expand early voting and no-excuse absentee voting. They say their top election concern is the largely mythical issue of election integrity — though their opposition to expanding voting rights could also stem from the fact that “unlikely voters” tend to be less likely to support GOP candidates.

While in the majority in the last legislative session, Minnesota Republicans put a strict voter ID constitutional amendment before the voters — allegedly to address election integrity concerns. While early polls showed strong support, by Election Day voters solidly rejected the proposal.

In his time in the U.S. Senate and as Governor, Dayton has generally been a solid progressive. But rather than recognize that Minnesotans rejected the voter suppression tactics of the GOP — and embraced the pro-voting rights DFL — Dayton’s curious move is giving the minority the power to suppress the voting rights of Minnesotans.

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.

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.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) became one of the most notorious figures of the 2012 election after he slashed the period for early voting and enacted a number of other vote suppressing election laws. As a result of these laws, Florida voters were forced to wait in lines for up to 6 hours and as late as 1 am. After the election, several top Republicans admitted these election laws were designed to keep Democrats and minority voters away from the polls.

As his public image sinks, the governor has tried to distance himself from his own laws, blaming the Legislature and even denying to a group of black lawmakers Tuesday that the early voting law was his. On Thursday, Scott went even further and endorsed major election reforms–including a reversal of his early voting restrictions.

Scott now supports increasing the number of early voting days, reducing ballot length, and widening the range of polling places:

The proposal calls for extending early voting once again to a maximum of 14 days from 8, including adding back the Sunday before Election Day, a popular day among black voters; increasing voting hours to 168 hours from 96; allowing votes to be cast at locations beyond election offices, city halls and libraries; and making sure that ballots are kept short. Any change in the law must be approved by the Legislature, which convenes for its one-month session in March.

Mr. Scott’s endorsement comes on the same day as the release of a new report concluding that black and Latino voters were most affected by the 2011 changes. Of the more than 1.17 million ballots cast by black voters, nearly half were during early voting.

If early voting days are restored, the state could avoid a repeat of the 2012 fiasco, in which thousands of Floridians were disenfranchised.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a law cutting early voting days in what was widely viewed as an effort to frustrate voters who tend to vote both early and Democratic from casting a ballot. Indeed, in the wake of the six hour voting lines created by Rick Scott’s law, several Republicans openly admitted that the goal of Scott’s changes to Florida voting law was to prevent Democrats — and, in particular, African-American Democrats — from casting a vote.

Immediately after election day, Scott was unapologetic for the lines his policy caused, claiming that he “did the right thing” by standing against early voting. Since then, his polling numbers have cratered, with 52 percent of Floridians saying he does not deserve a second term. So Scott decided to hum a different tune in an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien this morning — suggesting that the long lines were somehow someone else’s fault:

SCOTT: We got to go back and look at the number of days of early voting we have.

O’BRIEN: There’s some people who said you could have extended early voting. I mean, I guess I’m asking how much of blame do you hold in this — do you hold yourself accountable for? Because there are people who blamed you, very vociferously frankly, for not extending early voting . . . .

SCOTT: Well Soledad, you know, I complied with the law. We had an election bill that was passed, um, my first year in office by the legislature. It was approved by the Justice Department. So I complied with the law.

Watch it:

Of course, the anti-voting law that Scott supposedly “complied” with was not simply passed by the Florida legislature. It was also signed into law — by Rick Scott! If Scott objected to suppressing the early vote, he could have demonstrated that fact by vetoing this law instead.

Later in the interview, Scott admits that “we do need change,” and he calls for a “bipartisan” plan to restore confidence in his state’s elections. If he is serious about this, State Sens. Arthenia Joyner (D-FL) and Gwen Margolis (D-FL) already have a bill he can endorse. Their bill would reinstate two full weeks of early voting days and would require 12 hours of early voting per weekday and 12 hours total on weekends.