In 1981, the Republican National Committee allegedly engaged in an illegal campaign to intimidate minority voters, in some cases even enlisting armed, off-duty law enforcement as part of a “National Ballot Security Task Force.” The RNC eventually settled the lawsuit by agreeing to several conditions, including a promise that they would “refrain from undertaking any ballot security activities in polling places or election districts” for the purpose of targeting voters by race and discouraging them from voting.

Last year, a federal appeals court rejected the RNC’s request to lift this ban on voter intimidation. Under the lower courts’ decisions, the anti-intimidation order will remain in effect until at least 2017. The Supreme Court turned down the RNC’s petition to review this case Monday. Thus the Republicans will likely remain subject to the order’s ban on voter intimidation for at least one more presidential election cycle.

Although the RNC remained subject to this court order last November, other Republican Party groups actively partnered with Tea Party organizations to target African-American neighborhoods for anti-voter fraud witchhunts. Similarly, the Tea Party group True The Vote encouraged its members to circumvent the court order by engaging in voter suppression tactics independently of the Republican Party.

When Secretary of State Matt Schultz attempted to purge voters from the rolls in advance of the November 2012 election, a county judge temporarily blocked the move, finding that the rules issued by Schultz created fear and uncertainty and could deter legitimate voters. But that risk of voter suppression hasn’t stopped Schultz from proposing a new slightly tweaked rule to remove registered voters in the name of alleged voter fraud.

The rule would allow Schultz’s office to challenge the legitimacy of registered voters who are listed as noncitizens in the Department of Transportation database. Citing a DOT list of some 3,000 registered voters labeled noncitizens, Schultz said, “I have to do something. I can’t just sit back and do nothing when we know people are taking advantage of the system.”

But Schultz’s testimony just last month before the Senate Judiciary Committee shows that he doesn’t know people are taking advantage of the system. When probed by Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) for evidence of voter fraud, Schultz cited just six arrests — not convictions – out of 1.6 million votes cast. And this was after a special agent was designated to specifically target voter fraud.

As for the list of 3,000 people, that claim was easily dismissed by the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund’s Nina Perales during the same hearing:

Secretary Schultz … said he had identified 3,500 noncitizens using the driver’s license rolls. He did not. He identified 3,500 people who were noncitizens at the time that they obtained their driver’s licenses. And we know that since that time and before they registered to vote, the overwhelming majority and perhaps all of them have become naturalized citizens. So at this point, anyone who undertakes to accuse people of non-citizenship based on driver’s licenses should be on notice that this is not correct and should not be done. It’s fundamentally unfair.

Attempts to prove voter fraud nationwide have fallen similarly short, with less than 20 instances of fraud charges offered in most states. Florida GOP officials have even publicly admitted voter suppression was the goal of that state’s aggressive and inaccurate purge.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are also arguing that Schultz cannot implement a purge without going through the state legislature. The ruling that blocked Schultz’s last attempt said that, at the very least, Schultz should have gone through the proper rulemaking procedure that allows for public input instead of going forward on his own. Schultz is now going through that procedure, but the court could still hold this process insufficient.

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.

The past two years have not been kind to voting rights. Across the country, the Tea Party wave of 2010 led to new restrictive voting measures, including photo identification requirements and cuts in early voting. In total, these changes had the potential to disenfranchise more than 5 million Americans.

However, with progressive victories in the 2012 election and a renewed awareness of the need to protect the ballot box, 2013 could be a banner year for voting rights.

Rather than continuing to solely play defense, the Center for American Progress has released a report detailing 11 pieces of state legislation that voting rights advocates can use to go on offense in 2013:

1. Online voter registration. Less than 63 percent of Americans aged 18-34 were registered to vote in 2009, yet a Nielsen survey found that these young citizens were by far the most electronically connected, with 88 percent having an Internet connection at home. Modernizing the voter-registration process and allowing people to register online would be a boon for the overall number of voters in our country.

2. Election Day registration. Most states bar their residents from registering in the weeks just before an election—at a time when media coverage is at a fever pitch and less-engaged citizens are just starting to tune in. Some states, such as Pennsylvania, stop allowing people to register 30 days before an election. Election Day registration eliminates that barrier, helping a significant number of Americans vote. In 2008 alone, more than 1 million individuals registered on Election Day in these states. Studies have found that Election Day registration boosts turnout on average by 7-percentage points to 14-percentage points.

3. Require public schools to help register voters. Young Americans continue to vote at far lower rates than the rest of the citizenry. This year, for instance, only half of the voting-eligible population between the ages of 18 and 24 cast a ballot, compared to more than two-thirds of senior citizens. One simple way to encourage students to vote is for states to require that public schools provide voter-registration services.

4. Expand early voting. Early voting is one of the most important realms of voting rights over the past decade. It offers citizens more flexibility to vote at their convenience—not everyone can take off an hour or two from work on the first Tuesday of November—and allows election officials to spread the process of counting ballots over a number of days or weeks, rather than getting inundated all at once. It’s also a major boon for minority turnout. Many African American churches, for instance, participate in a “souls to the polls” voting drive on the Sunday before Election Day helping boost black early voting rates. Currently, 16 states don’t offer early voting.
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Looking to continue the spread of voter suppression laws that have popped up over the past two years, lawmakers introduced voter ID legislation in three more states last week.

Legislators in Arkansas, Montana, and New York introduced separate bills to require voters to show certain forms of government-issued photo identification or be denied their right to vote.

Two of the bills — SB 2 in Arkansas and SB 100 in New York — are the strict form of voter ID, whereby voters who don’t have an acceptable form of photo ID are simply turned away from the polls. The bill in Montana — HB 108 — allows those voters who don’t have photo ID to cast a provisional ballot.

Approximately 1 in 10 citizens lack photo ID, putting them at risk of being disenfranchised. According to the Brennan Center, minorities, senior citizens, and poor voters tend to be hardest hit by new voter ID laws.

Still, voter rights advocates needn’t sound the alarm in these three states, yet. The voter ID bills face a tough legislative future. In both Arkansas and Montana, Republicans control both chambers of the state legislature, but Democrats still control the governor’s mansion. In New York, Democrats enjoy both the governorship and the state Assembly.

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.