The big story for the 1,500 media members scurrying around Iowa trying to find something for cable news to shout about for the next few hours is that Newt Gingrich called Mitt Romney a liar, accusing Romney of illegal coordination with the Super PACs that firebombed Newt’s candidacy with negative ads in Iowa. But the problem is the unfettered secret Super PACs themselves.

Concerned about a nonexistent threat to the integrity of the caucuses, the Iowa Republican Party will move their ballot-counting operation to an “undisclosed location.” Meanwhile, the same Republicans who spent all year fretting about voter fraud, and who are shrouding their vote tabulation activities in secrecy, do not require a photo ID to vote in the caucuses they run.

Because the Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law in 2008, it would not surprise me to see them uphold South Carolina’s version. And that could be a means to invalidate Section 5, giving Southern states with a history of racial discrimination in voting the chance to do so again.

So here’s a wild end-of-the-year situation: Charlie White, the Secretary of State of Indiana, has been ruled ineligible to serve by a judge in Marion County. White has been battling charges that he was illegally registered to vote at the wrong address. In other words, he would be the most high-profile perpetrator of voter fraud in recent US history.

What’s more, the judge ruled that the second-place finisher in the 2010 Indiana Secretary of State’s race, Democrat Vop Osili, should be made the Secretary of State.

After the successful recall of two Republican state Senators, the next target by the youth/labor/progressive alliance in the state is Scott Walker. Under Wisconsin law, petitioners have to wait until Walker has been in office a year to submit a recall petition. This gives Walker and his cronies in the legislature ample time to change the recall process.

So here’s a new wrinkle for the recall saga in Wisconsin. Three of the elections against state Senate Republicans have already been certified. There is a hearing scheduled this week to deal with challenges to the other six – three against Republicans, three against Democrats. But the Government Accountability Board has delayed the decision on the Democratic recalls, because of allegations of faulty signature-gathering.

Kloppenburg has precisely the right attitude about this recount: “A recount may change the outcome of this election or it may confirm it, but when it is done, a recount will have shed necessary and appropriate light on an election that, right now, seems to so many people to be suspect.”

In a bit of a surprise, assistant US Attorney JoAnne Kloppenburg has filed for a statewide recount of the Wisconsin state Supreme Court election, according to the Government Accountability Board, which oversees the process there.

At the end of the official canvass, Republican Justice David Prosser had a 7,316-vote lead out of 1.5 million ballots cast. This fell just within the 0.5% margin necessary for Kloppenburg to request a recount that would be paid for by the state.