Colorado’s state ethics panel has ruled that Secretary of State Scott Gessler (R) violated state ethics laws and breached public trust for his own personal gain. Gessler, best known for his failed voter purge and his crusade against largely nonresistant voter fraud, received a fine for the violations.

The Denver Post reported Thursday that Colorado’s Independent Ethics Commission found Gessler had “breached the public trust for private gain” by using public funds to pay for his trip to a Republican National Lawyers Association in Florida. The panel also found he broke state ethics laws by keeping money from his office discretionary account without submitting receipts.

Gessler released a statement attacking the impartiality of the five-member independent ethics panel. “As we said from the start, I’ve had grave concerns about this tribunal’s ability to be fair and objective. Every attempt we made to expose the truth and the facts in the case were met with resistance or rejected outright. Instead of impartial, engaged commissioners, I faced a group of my political adversaries. In fact, two commissioners have donated to my political opponents, and they both unsurprisingly ruled against me.”

As a candidate for his current job, Gessler campaigned on a promise to fight the wildly exaggerated problem of election fraud. As Colorado’s chief elections official, Gessler spearheaded a voter purge targeting thousands of alleged non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls. He was eventually forced to largely abandon this purge, however, after his efforts revealed that non-citizen voting is a virtually non-existent problem and after nearly 90 percent of registered voters he suspected to be non-citizens proved to be citizens.

Last year, two state courts in Wisconsin deemed unconstitutional the state’s law requiring photo identification to vote and blocked enforcement of the law, joining other courts around the country that deemed the new round of vote-suppressive laws as infringing on the right to vote. On Thursday, a Wisconsin appeals court overturned one of those rulings. And while the decision could potentially pave the way for upholding the law overall, the three-judge majority in this case took pains to make clear that their ruling is limited to this case only. In the meantime, the law will remain blocked while appeals proceed on several other challenges to the law.

The League of Women Voters challenged the law as unconstitutional on its face, reasoning that it violates the state Constitution’s suffrage provision by creating a new class of people excluded from voting — those without identification. The court rejected this argument and held that, without other constitutional arguments and/or particular evidence that the photo ID requirement will impose a particular burden, the court could not reject the law. They write:

[W]e emphasize that we do not mean to suggest that, assuming that the constitutional “reasonableness” test applies in this context, no identification requirement for potential voters that the legislature might enact could run afoul of either a facial or an as-applied challenge under Article III. Here, we conclude only that the League has not shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the photo identification requirement is, on its face, “so difficult and inconvenient as to amount to a denial” of the right to vote.

In the end, both the League’s argument as to why the photo identification requirement is, on its face, an unconstitutional “additional qualification,” and the League’s implicit argument that the requirement is constitutionally “unreasonable” under Article III, are not easy to pin down, particularly in light of its concessions. In any case, however, the League fails to make a persuasive argument under the correct legal test and substitutes a nebulous “too onerous” test that lacks meaningful content in this facial challenge.

Perhaps the most illuminating part of the decision comes in an extended footnote, in which the court points out that the other challenge pending in state court provides “fact-based evidence” that is lacking in the present case. They also note that even a U.S. Supreme Court case on a similar challenge to a voter ID law did not apply in this case, because that case makes different arguments that a photo ID requirement violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, and “substantially burdens the right to vote.”

All of this signals that at least these three judges would have been more amenable to the other state court challenge on its way, as well as other challenges that provide more evidence of photo ID’s impact. As the Milkwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports, two federal court challenges are also pending, but on hold while the state court cases continue.

After these state court rulings blocked the voter ID law last year, now-Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) sought to amend the state’s Constitution law to allow it. Nationwide, studies have found voter ID can disfranchise between 2 and 9 percent of voters, particularly minorities, while the only purpose of requiring the ID is to combat almost nonexistent in-person voter fraud. In Wisconsin, a study found that only 0.00023 percent of votes are the product of such fraud.

Other voter suppression proposals pushed by some state Republicans included eliminating the popular same-day registration program — likely one of the reasons for the state’s remarkable 70.1 percent turnout rate – and replacing a nonpartisan Government Accountability Board with political appointees.

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.

The conservative Weekly Standard flags a pool report where Vice President Joe Biden is quoted saying “there should be two senators from the state of D.C.,” a possibility the conservative magazine likely finds very concerning because, as they point out, “[t]wo new U.S. senators from Washington, D.C. would almost surely be Democrats.”

DC is, indeed, likely to elect Democrats, just like the state of Wyoming tends to elect Republicans. Yet we do not deny representation to the 576,412 people who live in Wyoming for partisan reasons or for any other. Significantly more people live in DC (632,323), than live in Wyoming, and DC’s population also exceeds the 626,011 people who live in Vermont. As Biden suggests, it is difficult to justify treating Americans who live in Wyoming or Vermont as if they are more worthy of representation than Americans who live in the nation’s capitol.

In 1979, the Supreme Court affirmed a decision holding that state cannot place unique burdens on college student votes that do not apply to other members of the electorate. Nevertheless, Ohio Republicans now want to punish state universities that encourage students to cast a ballot. Under a budget amendment filed by Republicans in the Ohio House, state universities that provide documents enabling students to register to vote in their college town, rather than in the state where their parents reside, will be forbidden from charging those students out-of-state tuition. Thus, the amendment would effectively reduce the funding of state schools that assist their students in registering to vote.

This is the second GOP attempt to restrict college students from voting in just the past month. About a month ago, a North Carolina Republican lawmaker filed a bill that would raise taxes on families with college students if the student registers to vote at school rather than in their parents’ hometown.

It’s not difficult to guess why Republicans support these — and other — efforts to make it harder for college students to cast a ballot. As former New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien (R) said when explaining his support for measures to make it harder to vote, “the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do.”

In 2010, Republicans took over both houses of the North Carolina legislature for the first time since 1870, due in no small part to the spending of a single, very wealthy Republican. As Jane Mayer reported in 2011, “three-quarters of the spending by independent groups in North Carolina’s 2010 state races came from accounts linked to” wholesale baron Art Pope. Of the 22 state legislative races targeted by Pope’s family and his organizations, 18 fell to Republicans. Yet Pope’s bought-and-paid-for legislature had limited reach until very recently thanks to the state’s Democratic Governor Beverly Perdue. That all changed last January, when Perdue was succeeded by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory.

With no remaining checks to Republican rule in North Carolina, the state has now become a haven for some of the most ideological — and ill-considered — tea party fantasies dressed up as legislation. Here are just a few of the bills being pushed in the house (and the senate) that Art Pope built:

• Voter Suppression : It’s a sad commentary on the state of American politics that once Republicans take over a state, they almost immediately begin enacting laws to make it harder for Democratic-leaning groups to cast a ballot. North Carolina Republicans, however, have embraced voter suppression with unusual enthusiasm. They’ve introduced voter ID, a common GOP method of reducing turnout among minorities, low-income voters and students. They’ve introduced Florida-like restrictions on early voting, cutting early voting hours and eliminating voting the Sunday before election day in order to thwart voting drives at African-American churches. And they want to punish parents whose children vote from their college addresses.
• Reverse Robin Hood: A GOP bill in the North Carolina Senate would eliminate all individual and corporate income taxes, and largely replace it with higher sales taxes. Sales taxes disproportionately burden lower-income taxpayers, because they spend a larger percentage of their income on basic needs. It is also far more difficult to create a progressive sales tax than to enact a progressive income tax code that places a lesser tax burden on those who can least afford it. As a result, a similar tax plan in Louisiana would raise taxes on 80 percent of residents, while giving Louisianans in the top 1 percent of income earners an average tax cut of $25,423.
• Shutting Down Abortion Clinics: Another bill in the state senate would add new restrictions to abortion clinics in an attempt to force them to close their doors. Among other things, the bill requires doctors to have admitting privileges in a hospital located within 30 miles of the clinic, an unnecessary restriction that serves little purpose other than to limit the pool of doctors available to clinics.
• Anti-Worker Constitutional Amendment: A so-called “right-to-work” law, which depresses worker wages by cutting back unions’ ability to collectively bargain for wages and benefits, is already the law in North Carolina, effectively cutting both union and non-union wages by $1,500 a year. Nevertheless, 34 Republican lawmakers (and one Democrat) sponsored a state constitutional amendment that would lock this anti-worker policy into the state Constitution. The same amendment would strip public sector workers of their right to collectively bargain, and lock in policies making it easier for companies to pressure their workers against unionizing to boot.
• Subsidizing Home Schooling: Eight Republican lawmakers sponsored a bill giving families a $1,250 per semester tax subsidy if they home school their children.
• Judges For Sale: A pair of bills in the state senate would eliminate the state’s successful public financing system for judicial elections. Prior to this system’s enactment in 2004, “73 percent of campaign funds for judicial candidates came from attorneys and special interest groups,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice’s Alicia Bannon. Now, it’s 14 percent. So public financing was successful in rolling back moneyed interest groups’ ability to buy and sell judges through campaign donations, and these GOP bills would throw judicial elections back to the old ways.
• State Sponsored Religion: Eleven Republicans, including the state’s House Majority Leader, backed a resolution proclaiming that the Constitution “does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional,” and then decreeing that North Carolina could establish its own state religion. On the bright side, state house Speaker Thom Tillis announced that he would not advance this resolution after it was widely panned.

The defeat of North Carolina’s religious endorsement resolution is a hopeful sign that these bills can be stopped. But it’s important to remember that the religious establishment bill was simply a non-binding resolution that amounted to little more than an ideological yawp. The real test is whether efforts to restrict the franchise, target women’s freedom, cut wages and enrich people like Art Pope are ultimately successful.

Attorney General Eric Holder has a solid record on voting rights, and he’s criticized Republican state lawmaker’s efforts to restrict the franchise in the past — at one point comparing voter ID laws to an unconstitutional poll tax. At a speech in New York yesterday, Holder added a new line to his previous attacks on voter suppression, suggesting that DOJ will respond with legal action if any Republican state lawmakers move forward with their proposals to rig the Electoral College:

Long lines are unnecessary. Shortened voting periods are unwise and inconsistent with the historic ideal of expanded participation in the process. Recent proposed changes in how electoral votes are apportioned in specific states are blatantly partisan, unfair, divisive, and not worthy of our nation. Let me be clear again: we will not sit by and allow the slow unraveling of an electoral system that so many sacrificed so much to construct.

There are two versions of the GOP’s election rigging plans, both of which Republicans want to enact exclusively in blue states. One version would allocate electoral votes in several targeted blue states by Congressional district, rather than to the winner of the state as a whole. The other version, which is currently being pushed by Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R), would allocate electoral votes proportionally — so that Mitt Romney would have won a significant chunk of Pennsylvania’s electoral voters even though President Obama carried the state. As with the congressional districts plan, Pileggi’s election-rigging plan would give away electoral votes to Republicans in his blue state, while still keeping all red state electors in GOP hands:

Holder’s suggestion that he would bring the full weight of the Department of Justice down upon any state that tried to steal the White House is certainly welcome, although it alone will not be enough to stop these election-rigging plans. Ultimately, the Justice Department’s ability to protect voting rights depends on a Supreme Court that is not openly hostile to the franchise — and the Roberts Court’s contempt for voting rights pervades their decisions. If the GOP election-rigging plans are to be defeated, it will require citizens in states like Pennsylvania raising their voice in outrage at this blatant attempt to steal American democracy.

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.