Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford (R) poured cold water on a Republican plan to rig the Electoral College that is being considered in a number of states to all but ensure that the next president will be a Republican.

A number of states that have voted consistently for Democrats at a national level but are currently controlled by Republicans at a state level, such as Virginia and Pennsylvania, are considering a change to the way they dole out presidential electoral votes. Currently, every state, except for Nebraska and Maine, uses a winner-take-all system. But a handful of Republican-controlled blue states are looking at a system of appropriating electoral votes by congressional district, based on maps gerrymandered to the GOP’s favor.

One possible state where this could happen is Florida, which has voted Democratic the last two presidential elections but is currently run by Republicans. However, Weatherford announced on Thursday that he opposed such a move. The Miami Herald has more:

Florida, the largest swing state, won’t go along with changing the Electoral College if Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford has any say (and he has a major say).

“To me, that’s like saying in a football game, ‘We should have only three quarters, because we were winning after three quarters and the beat us in the fourth,” Weatherford, a Republican, told the Herald/Times. “I don’t think we need to change the rules of the game, I think we need to get better.”

Fellow Republican leader, Senate President Don Gaetz, wasn’t favorable to the plan either. He said he would prefer a more progressive proposal: abolishing the Electoral College and replacing it with a national popular vote. Said Gaetz, “The farmer standing in his field in North Dakota should be just as important as the factory worker in Ohio.”

A Florida state representative wants to prevent people sentenced to death from getting a full review of their case, despite Florida leading the nation in people exonerated after being sentenced to die.

Like most death penalty states, Florida has a web of state-level appeals processes and additional checks to ensure that every aspect of a case is thoroughly examined before an accused criminal is executed. This system is expensive and often cruel, which is why many death penalty advocates cite extended death row wait times during the appellate process as a reason to abolish the system altogether (indeed, there’s a bill in the Florida state legislature that proposes to do just that). But Rep. Matt Gaetz (R) has a different view:

Every death penalty defendant deserves a fair trial. In Florida, they even get a mandatory appeal to the Supreme Court. But after the Supreme Court has spoken all subsequent appeals should be limited.

The problem with Gaetz’ “solution,” as Radley Balko notes, is that Florida leads the nation in death row exonerations. 24 people have been exonerated after being sentenced to die in Florida since the state reinstituted the death penalty in the 70s. That’s a full quarter of all slated executions in Florida during that time period.

Gaetz’ stated reason for wanting to shorten the appeal process is that it deters crime. He cites a study that purports to find “one less murder is committed for every 2.75-years reduction in death row waits.” This research is widely viewed as discredited. One scholar who reviewed the work found it “fraught with technical and conceptual errors: inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, failures to consider all the relevant factors that drive murder rates, missing data on key variables in key states, the tyranny of a few outlier states and years, and the absence of any direct test of deterrence.” The National Academy of Science believes the evidence that the death penalty deters crime in any fashion is so poor that it “should not influence policy judgments about capital punishment.” A National Research Council review came to a similar conclusion.

Aside from the cost and the failure to deter crime, capital sentencing also turns as much on race as on the nature of the crime.

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.

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.

Thanks in large part to a law signed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), which cut early voting opportunities in that state, many Florida voters endured six hour lines simply to cast a ballot. These lines did not wind up costing Obama Florida’s electoral votes, but, according to an Ohio State University study, they reduced the president’s margin of victory by thousands of votes in central Florida alone:

[A]s many as 49,000 people across Central Florida were discouraged from voting because of long lines on Election Day, according to a researcher at Ohio State University who analyzed election data compiled by the Orlando Sentinel.

About 30,000 of those discouraged voters — most of them in Orange and Osceola counties — likely would have backed Democratic President Barack Obama, according to Theodore Allen, an associate professor of industrial engineering at OSU.

About 19,000 voters would have likely backed Republican Mitt Romney, Allen said.

This suggests that Obama’s margin over Romney in Florida could have been roughly 11,000 votes higher than it was, based just on Central Florida results. Obama carried the state by 74,309 votes out of more than 8.4 million cast.

In the wake of the long lines triggered in the wake of Scott’s law, several top Republicans admitted the entire purpose of this legislation was to keep Democrats from the polls. Indeed, one GOP consultant explained that “cutting out of the Sunday before Election Day [from early voting] was one of their targets only because that’s a big day when the black churches organize themselves.” African-American voters overwhelmingly favored Obama last November.

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.

A Florida man defended his decision to shoot an impatient pizza customer over the weekend, citing the state’s infamous “Stand Your Ground” law.

Michael Jock, a 52-year-old resident of St. Petersburg, was standing in line behind 49-year-old Randall White at a local Little Caesars on Sunday when Jock grew angry over White’s complaints about the speed of service. The two began to shove one another, prompting Jock to pull out a .38 Taurus Ultralight Special Revolver that had been concealed on his person and fire twice, hitting White both times in the lower torso.

The Tampa Bay Times has more:

After the shooting, both men went outside and waited for police. Jock told officers the shooting was justified under “stand your ground,” [police spokesman Mike] Puetz said.

“He felt he was in his rights,” Puetz said. “He brought it up specifically and cited it to the officer.”

He told officers he feared for his life. He mentioned that he thought White had an object in his hand, then backed off that when officers pressed him. Florida’s “stand your ground law” says people are not required to retreat before using deadly force.

Police, however, disagreed with Jock’s interpretation of the law and arrested him on charges of aggravated battery and firing a weapon within a building.

The Stand Your Ground law that Jock referenced came under intense scrutiny this year after George Zimmerman invoked it to justify his shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin. Multiple studies have found that Stand Your Ground laws increase the number of homicides in a state. Still, such laws are a crown jewel for the National Rifle Association, which has been working tirelessly for years to spread them from state to state.