While it’s certainly no surprise to find that the government has turned to yet another corrupt monopoly to carry out its dirty work against ordinary citizens, I seriously question the quality of their co-conspirator, Verizon. If we are going to have a lawless corporate behemoth shoveling our personal data, or rather, in the parlance du jour, “meta” data, into the insatiable maw of the new police state, wouldn’t it be nicer if the company were also capable of performing its core function adequately?

I suppose it is only natural that within the effort to gut the Voting Rights Act — one of the most successful pieces of legislation in history — there is an agenda to eliminate voting rights entirely — well for one type of voter.

I’m just an old guy, but I remember when high voter turnout was something that a state was proud of.

What’s happening in Arizona right now, relatively under the radar in the traditional media (with a few notable exceptions), approaches the kind of thing you’d expect out of a banana republic. The short version is that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio didn’t want to lose re-election, so he and his colleagues tried to make sure that nobody of the Latino persuasion would be allowed to vote. And they used a variety of tactics to ensure that result. That’s pretty much what’s going on.

Part of the success in beating back efforts to limit election participation in a number of Republican-led states came from the work of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which used its pre-clearance authority under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to block measures that could have disenfranchised minorities, like district-level maps in Texas and a stringent voter ID law in South Carolina. Nine states and several localities with a history of discrimination are subject to pre-clearance rules that force them to get approval from DoJ for any voting law changes. And now, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to Section 5.

When people can vote, liberals win. I think that’s one of the major takeaways of the night. Take a look at the historic victories for marijuana legalization, a blow against thirty years of the war on drugs. The measure passed in Washington and Colorado. What’s the unifying thread? Washington is 100% vote-by-mail, and Colorado has enough vote-by-mail and early voting options that 80% of the electorate voted before Election Day. Marriage equality and LGBT rights got validated at the ballot box for the first time ever in four states. What’s the unifying thread? Maine and Minnesota have Election Day registration. Washington, as noted before, is 100% vote by mail. Maryland has ample early voting. Expanding the voter universe with online voter registration completely changed the political landscape in California.

Polls predicting a narrow victory for President Obama in tomorrow’s Presidential election are only “skewed” in the sense that they don’t take into account the persistent attempts at voter suppression in key battleground states controlled by Republicans.

The transgender population is a small population, and to my knowledge until this election trans voters haven’t been systematically targeted for voter suppression. Well, this year trans people are being targeted for voter suppression by True The Vote. A graphic from True The Vote’s Virginia training materials shows what the organization thinks about trans citizens.

Republicans nationwide are pushing laws they claim are intended to “stop voter fraud” which they imply is committed mostly by nonwhites and non-Republicans. But in the rare instances of voter fraud and misrepresentation that I’ve seen, the only people committing it are all Republicans. Here are a few examples.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted may get his wish of disenfranchisement after all. A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday placed a stay on a lower court ruling that would allow voter disenfranchisement based on poll worker error.