It's coming.

Later today.  Just want to factor in any late-breaking developments, like this one in Louisiana or this one -- and this underlying factor -- in Georgia.  Meanwhile....

-- The Notorious RBG was correct.

A Texas voter ID law considered to be one of the most restrictive in the country is doing exactly what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned it would do: stopping Americans from voting.

A disabled woman in Travis County was turned away from voting because she couldn’t afford to pay her parking tickets. An IHOP dishwasher from Mercedes can’t afford the cost of getting a new birth certificate, which he would need to obtain the special photo ID card required for voting. A student at a historically black college in Marshall, who registered some of her fellow students to vote, won't be able to cast a ballot herself because her driver's license isn't from Texas and the state wouldn't accept her student identification card.

There are plenty of stories like this coming out of Texas in the early voting period leading up to Election Day. Texas' tough voter ID law, signed by Gov. Rick Perry in 2011, requires voters to show one of seven types of photo identification. Concealed handgun licenses are allowed, but college student IDs are not, nor are driver’s licenses that have been expired for more than sixty days.

The law has been the subject of an extensive legal battle, with a federal court finding it unconstitutional earlier this month. But the Supreme Court then rejected an emergency request to put the law on hold for the upcoming election. Ginsburg authored a blistering dissent to that decision, calling the law an "unconstitutional poll tax.” The ruling marked the first time in 32 years that the Supreme Court allowed a law restricting voting rights to be implemented after a federal court ruled it unconstitutional for targeting minorities, according to SCOTUSblog.

The early voting period is still going on in Texas, but voters and election officials told The Huffington Post there have already been problems casting ballots due to the new restrictive measure. Under the law, Texans without acceptable forms of identification must go to a driver’s license office to get a voting card. In Austin, 45-year-old Eric Kennie, who hasn't set foot outside the state his whole life, couldn't get his card because the birth certificate he struggled to afford lists his mother's maiden name. In Houston, an election judge claims that a 93-year-old veteran was turned away from the polls because his driver's license had been expired for too long. Another 62-year-old woman told MSNBC that she was threatened with jail time when she went to obtain her voter ID because she was driving with a California license.

Dana DeBeauvoir, the clerk responsible for overseeing election conduct in Travis County, which has over one million people and includes the city of Austin, said she spoke this week to a 61-year-old disabled woman, Madeleine, who was “in tears” because she was turned away when she went to vote at a grocery store.

The low-income woman is on a payment plan with a court to pay off her parking tickets, DeBeauvoir said, and while she’s on the plan, her license is suspended. Now, Madeleine has to quickly get to a driver’s license office to get a voting card. Her disability qualifies her to vote by mail, but she missed that deadline because she didn’t know her license would be denied.

”She’s been voting every year since the day 18-year-olds got the right to vote, and now suddenly she finds out she’s lost her right to vote because of money,” DeBeauvoir said. “If she had money, she could just pay off the tickets [and] vote.” 

Poll tax, anyone? Greg Bueller?

-- I love it when Jon Stewart nails Democrats almost as much as when he skewers Republicans.

Jon Stewart kicked off The Daily Show‘s last night in Texas by addressing Democratic hopes that the red state is turning blue, which, well not to give anything away, but that’s probably not gonna happen. As Stewart put it, “Texas has been a conservative state since dinosaurs roamed it 6000 years ago.”

Stewart examined all the Republican candidates running for office who have proven to be solidly conservative, even gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott, who wants both Bibles and guns taught in schools. Stewart proposed the Greg Abbott “Howdy Jesus Bang Bang Bible Academy” if he’s really serious about that.

Stewart had to conclude that Democrats trying to flip Texas over to their column are like straight dudes who convince themselves they can successfully hit on lesbian women and flip them.

Video.  No grill in Texas got hotter than the one in the Zach Theatre in Austin this past week.

Can't do that but I can do this

That thing yesterday I was going to do.  Can't yet.  While we wait for me to finish...

-- Georgia on my mind.

Voting rights advocates are considering legal options after a Georgia judge denied their lawsuit that would have compelled the state to add 40,000 newly registered voters to the rolls.

Judge Christopher Brasher said voters whose registration applications were lost may cast provisional ballots in next week's election. But he declined to force Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp and counties to ensure voting for the thousands of new voters. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the New Georgia Project, and the Georgia branch of the NAACP are weighing whether to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.

"You've got a situation that was designed to wreak havoc on the elections office if a large number of provisional ballots are cast," Julie Houk, a senior special counsel with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights' voting rights project, told The Huffington Post Wednesday. She said provisional ballots are "not an adequate remedy" because "registered voters are entitled to cast a regular ballot."

Voting rights advocates said the judge's decision could potentially disenfranchise thousands of people, a disproportionate number of whom are minorities, and disrupt Georgia's high-profile races for U.S. Senate and governor.

The voters in question were registered during a six-month drive by the nonpartisan New Georgia Project, led by state House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams (D). The group submitted more than 86,000 applications, a majority from young voters of color registering to vote for the first time, along with another 20,000 or so from other groups. Abrams' group alleges that 40,000 of those applications are mysteriously missing from the state's official voter rolls, and that the state has not provided an explanation. 

Oh well.  At least it's not five hundred thousand Americans across ten states (which is nearly as many as the number of Texans, all by itself).  Try to keep this in mind: showing your ID when you vote protects your rights, but showing your ID when you want to buy a gun second-hand is a violation of your rights.

Count on seeing a lot more logic like this, and not too long after the election returns start rolling in next Tuesday evening.  I think my favorite one is going to be, "use it or lose it", with respect to your right to vote.  I don't think Texas Republicans are going to make that a bumper sticker or a campaign slogan, but nevertheless it's an accurate description of how they intend to "govern".  Stand by ladies, your rights to reproductive choice are next.  Use them, don't use them... you're losing them anyway.

Democrats just don't use fear as a motivator as well as the Republicans, as we know.  (Can't believe I wrote that in January.)

-- You know how conservatives always say "I don't understand why people can't get an ID to vote"?  Almost as often as they say "I'm not a scientist" when they deny climate change is happening, or "I'm not a gynocologist" when they pass laws forcing poor women to give birth?  Next time they do that, show them this.

Real people.  Real stories.  Pretty sure Republicans still won't understand.  Or care.

Four more years!

The battle for the US Senate *continued

As my Twitter feed to the right suggests, today is a good day to update the upper chamber predictions.  In fact there's already a poll result that contradicts the one I Tweeted a few minutes ago (it has Joni Ernst up four).  That race is going right down to the wire.  And this article notes that 2014, long touted as the Year of the Woman, may just be the Year of the Republican Woman.

Like Booman, I feel some historically extreme amount of uncertainty about my guesses this close to Election Day.  Be that as it may, I'll take some dart throws (sorry, Susan).   But I won't have time to finish my post for publication this morning; too much to do.  That update will appear in this space later this evening, after tonight's town hall on the high speed rail line transiting Texas from Dallas to Houston.

In the meantime, you can read the creeping depression of experts' interpretation of the turnout figures for Texas and Harris County, and also about the pro-marijuana decriminalization movement's newest public convert: Mayor Annise Parker.  I wonder if all of these new Republicans on the precipice of election will listen to their (very stoned) constituents and revisit the state's marijuana laws.

On second thought , I don't wonder about that all.  Like God's response to so many of his supporters' requests... sometimes the answer is no.

*Alas, still too much going on.  Soon, I promise.

True the Vote loses another lawsuit

0 for 2 in court over the past month.

True the Vote, the Republican voter suppression movement, lost a round in its battle against the IRS yesterday when U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton dismissed its lawsuit against the IRS. True the Vote had claimed it had been targeted for greater IRS scrutiny due to its conservative point of view.

Judge Walton also dismissed a similar lawsuit brought by Linchpins of Liberty and 40 other groups. According to Forbes:

It’s important to understand that Judge Walton, a Presidential Bush nominee to the court, did not rule on the merits of the case. He didn’t decide that the IRS conduct was okay or that no harm was done. He ruled, rather, that procedurally, the case had nowhere to go. Since the plaintiffs in both instances could not prove ongoing harm – nor could they prove that there were not other remedies available – Judge Walton dismissed these cases.

A copy of the ruling is here.

However, True the Vote is continuing its vigilante tactics at voter suppression, emailing its supporters a call to arms, claiming "Elections will be stolen" on November 4.

"Voter fraud vigilantes"

James O'Keefe has beaten this dead horse over and over again.  The latest Republican talking point is that "photo IDs are free".  This is deliberately misleading.  Here's the evidence.

To get an EIC, (Eric) Kennie needs to be able to show the Texas department of public safety (DPS) other forms of documentation that satisfy them as to his identity. He presented them with his old personal ID card – issued by the DPS itself and with his photo on it – but because it is more than 60 days expired (it ran out in 2000) they didn’t accept it. Next he showed them an electricity bill, and after that a cable TV bill, but on each occasion they said it didn’t cut muster and turned him away.

Each trip to the DPS office involved taking three buses, a journey that can stretch to a couple of hours. Then he had to stand in line, waiting for up to a further three hours to be seen, before finally making another two-hour schlep home.

In one of his trips to the DPS last year they told him he needed to get hold of a copy of his birth certificate as the only remaining way he could meet the requirements and get his EIC. That meant going on yet another three-bus trek to the official records office in a different part of town.

The cost of acquiring a birth certificate in Texas is $23, which may not sound much but it is to Kennie. He is poor, like many of the up to 600,000 Texans caught in the current voter ID trap.

There's also a 93-year-old veteran in Houston who begs to differ with the state's definition of 'free'.

Now if you want to read a cogent argument in favor of voter photo ID, Mona Charon manages a few (through the fog of thinly disguised partisan ad hominem).  But the point remains that photo IDs required for voting should actually be free and unrestricted, unlike what the Texas law stipulates.  Which is why the Supreme Court will eventually strike it down, as even Republican election law attorneys understand.

For this election, whether or not the law is working as intended seems to be the $64,000 question.  Update: FWIW, Greg Wythe's numbers show some reasons to be pessimistic.