On today's BradCast, more Republican efforts to keep (certain) voters from voting in several states where demographics are quickly moving against them, and they're beginning to get very worried, for good reason, in advance of 2018 --- but even ahead of the important U.S. House special election run-off election set for June in Georgia! [Audio link to show is posted below.]

Among the many stories covered on today's news-packed show...

• The Republicans' stolen U.S. Supreme Court helped Arkansas kill a man on Thursday night;
• Trump sold millions of dollars of access to corporate giants during his inauguration in January;
• Nevada's Republican Sec. of State invents a "non-citizen" voting scare in the state;
• Georgia's GOP Sec. of State is sued for blocking new voter registrations in violation of federal law, in advance of June's high-profile U.S. House special election run-off in GA-06;
• Yet another federal court finds that Republican legislators in Texas intentionally discriminated against Hispanic voters when drawing up statehouse districts. (The 4th finding by a federal court of intentional racial discrimination by the TX GOP in the past two months, making the state more than eligible for special oversight under the Voting Rights Act!)
• Sen. Ted Cruz (and other Republicans) may find themselves in big trouble in 2018;
• Britain goes coal free for the first time since the industrial age;
• Desi Doyen joins us for the latest Green News Report as Saudi Arabia invests $50 billion in renewable energy and scientists prepare to march for science;
• U.S. Treasure Dept. rejects ExxonMobil's request to lift sanctions against Russia so that the company can drill for oil in the Arctic...

Enjoy!...

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On today's BradCast: Rightwing extremist groups are reportedly plotting to wreak potential havoc on Election Day, as Donald Trump's candidacy has helped to mainstream previously fringe organizations. [Audio link to show is posted below.]

Despite Trump's repeated claims that millions of 'dead people' are voting, the evidence --- reported many years ago by The BRAD BLOG and more recently even by a mainstream corporate news outlet investigation in Wisconsin --- continues to show otherwise.

But while the threat of zombie voters has long been wildly overstated by Republicans, rightwing extremist groups --- neo-nazis, the KKK, militia organizations and others --- are claiming they have plans to mobilize a "show of force" at polling places across the country next Tuesday. That, as another black church in Mississippi is set on fire this week with the words "Vote Trump" spray painted onto it.

So, do these radical groups pose a real threat for chaos and disenfranchisement on Election Day? Or are they just latching on to Trump's racist coat tails in hopes of intimidating American voters? Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists and hate groups, joins us to answer those questions and much more related to this extraordinary election and the not-coincidental emergence and rise of the so-called "Alt-Right".

Potok, who tells me he believes "there's a real possibility of sporadic violence" next week, says "the Radical Right in America today has a hero, in the [Republican] nominee for President of the United States. They see Donald Trump as the best thing, politically, that they've seen in a half-century or more, going back to at least George Wallace and probably further. They're thrilled. They are very energized."

He tells me that in his 25 years on this beat, he has never seen the radical right play such a key role in an American Presidential election, and explains that the term "Alt-Right" is little more than "a re-branding of white supremacy for the digital age."

"Trump," he explains "has taken the lid off Pandora's Box in a very real and substantial way." But will the threat that they pose to the nation be worse if Trump wins or if he loses? Tune in for that and much more (including --- make sure you are sitting down for it --- my defense, of sorts, of the late, rightwing propagandist Andrew Breitbart! Yes, there's another example of how insane this election year has become.)

Also on today's BradCast: In North Carolina, a federal judge finds the state's statute allowing challenges to the voter rolls to be "insane", and the state's incumbent U.S. Senator who is locked in a close re-election battle, apologizes for disturbing comments about 'targeting' Hillary Clinton, but vows to keep anybody from being seated on the U.S. Supreme Court for the next four years if she wins.

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It's been a rough week, so today on The BradCast, we try and catch up on a whole bunch of stuff we haven't been able to get to over the past several days in the wake of Orlando. [Audio link to complete show follow below.]

It's now been one full year since Donald Trump entered the race --- and since we accurately predicted the precise effect he would have on the GOP's 2016 Presidential Primary. Sure enough, the wheel's are now falling completely off for Republicans. Among the fresh evidence: John McCain declares (repeatedly) that Obama is "directly responsible" for the Orlando Massacre, while lying about how and why we 'left' Iraq. It's now so bad for Republicans that George W. Bush, of all people, is coming to the party's 'rescue'. Good luck with that. But, no worries, the GOP has declared the Republican National Convention a gun-free (and fruit-free) zone, so all is well.

On the Democratic side of the aisle, Bernie Sanders offers an online message to supporters, calling on them to work together to defeat Trump and to run for office at the state and local level to the continue the "political revolution". Meanwhile, polls begin to look very good for Hillary Clinton nationally and even in a number of traditionally very "red" states (could a Dem actually win in Utah and in Kansas this year?) All of that would seem to be good news for Democrats, but only if they are allowed to vote this November, which may just have gotten slightly easier for some in Kansas, where GOP "voter fraud" fraudster, Sec. of State Kris Kobach, continues to shame the state.

Finally today, we finish up with the latest Green News Report following the hottest May ever recorded on Planet Earth, and the emergence of new proof that Trump was for action on climate change before he decided to pretend it was all "a hoax".

All of that and much more on today's BradCast!...

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Today on The BradCast I spoke with Tyson Slocum,the Director of Public Citizen's energy program following the explosion and now oil spill into the Hudson River at the controversial Indian Point nuclear facility just 30 miles north of New York City and the 20 million people in harms way in the metropolitan area. What went wrong at the facility? Why is it still even in operation? And, oh, yeah, should we be worried still about what is happening at Fukushima while we're at it?

Then, I was joined by "DocDawg" of Daily Kos whose startling analysis published late last week, documenting an as-yet unexplained plummet in voter registration forms submitted via public assistance agencies in North Carolina since Gov. Pat McCrory (R) took office, has now lead to the threat of legal action by civil rights groups [PDF] who see a disturbing violation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA or "Motor Voter Act") of 1993. Someone has some explaining to do in the Tar Heel State where Republicans there have also enacted the most extreme voter suppression law since the Jim Crow era. You gotta check out this disturbing story!

Plus, some breaking news on the jackass George Zimmerman who was reportedly involved in yet another shooting today and a new report finding that the Baltimore City Jail turned away thousands of arrestees since 2012 after they were brought in by police but too injured to be admitted.

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It's been happening for years now. On the day after elections like last Tuesday's, media figures begin navel gazing to figure out how pre-election polls, created by dozens of independent pollsters using dozens of different methodologies, could all find the same thing but turn out to be so wrong once the election results are in.

The presumption is that the results are always right, and if they don't match the pre-election polling, its the polling that must be wrong, as opposed to the election results.

On Wednesday morning, after Tuesday's mid-term election surprise in which Republicans reportedly won handily in race after race despite pre-election polls almost unanimously predicting much closer races or outright Democratic victories, FiveThirtyEight statistics guru Nate Silver declared "The Polls Were Skewed Toward Democrats".

His analysis of aggregated averages from dozens of different pollsters and polls this year found that the performance of Democrats was overestimated by approximately 4 percentage points in Senate races and 3.4 points in gubernatorial contests. Silver's assessment relies on a "simple average of all polls released in the final three weeks of the campaign," as compared to the (unofficial and almost entirely unverified) election results reported on Tuesday night. He doesn't suggest there was anything nefarious in the polling bias towards Dems this year, simply that the pollsters got it wrong for a number of speculative reasons.

Citing the fact that nearly all of the polls suggested Democrats would do much better than they ultimately did, when compared to the reported election results, Silver asserts it wasn't that the polls were more wrong that usual, per se, but that almost all of them were wrong in a way that appears to have overestimated Democratic performance on Election Day.

"This year's polls were not especially inaccurate," he explains. "Between gubernatorial and Senate races, the average poll missed the final result by an average of about 5 percentage points --- well in line with the recent average. The problem is that almost all of the misses were in the same direction."

Silver is much smarter than I when it comes to numbers; I'm happy to presume he has the basic math right. But he seems to have a blind spot in his presumption that the pre-election polls were wrong and the election results were right. That, despite the lack of verification of virtually any of the results from Tuesday night, despite myriad and widespread if almost completely ignored problems and failures at polls across the country that day, and despite systematic voter suppression and dirty tricks that almost certainly resulted in election results (verified or otherwise) that were skewed toward Republicans...

No doubt this is precisely the sort of thing that Chris Christie, New Jersey's governor, chair of the Republican Governors Association and 2016 Republican Presidential hopeful, was talking about last week when discussing the need for Republicans to be in charge of the "voting mechanisms" in 2016.

New Mexico, certain to be a key swing state once again in the 2016 Presidential election, currently has both a Republican Governor, the popular Susana Martinez, and a Republican Secretary of State, Dianna Duran. Both are up for re-election this year. Duran is in a neck-and-neck race against her Democratic opponent Maggie Toulouse Oliver.

Duran is one of those GOP "voter fraud" fraudsters who likes to pretend there is a massive epidemic of voter fraud that needs correcting via polling place Photo ID restrictions, even though such measures prevent far more legal (largely Democratic-leaning) votes from being cast than fraudulent ones --- and even though she's been able to find next to none since taking office four years ago.

At the same time, Duran appears to be slow-walking thousands of perfectly legal new voter registrations from being processed by the state Motor Vehicle Department (MVD), despite a 2010 court order issued after a settlement with the federal government requiring New Mexico to comply with the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, the so-called "Motor Voter" law.

On Monday, the Santa Fe New Mexican offered this distressing report from Brian Sweeney, a state voter, or, at least, someone who has been trying to be one for months without success...

[This article now cross-published by Salon...]

UC Irvine law professor Rick Hasen says this development, which he describes as coming from the "Irony Dept", is just "too delicious".

Leslie Rutledge, the Republican candidate for Attorney General in Arkansas, has been discovered to have been registered to vote in multiple states in addition to Arkansas, and even voted by absentee ballot in Arkansas' general election in November of 2008 --- after she had registered to vote in Washington D.C. [PDF] in July of the same year.

According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Rutledge has now been removed from Arkansas' voting rolls by the Pulaski County Clerk, after he confirmed that she was registered to vote in D.C., and possibly Virginia. The removal from the rolls may also lead to her ineligibility to be elected to office.

Rutledge's Arkansas absentee ballot request form for the 2008 general election is here [PDF]. And, indeed, her subsequent voter registration form from Virginia is here [PDF].

"For the AG candidate of the party who likes to scream about voter fraud to be registered in two (or three) places at once is ironic and amusing on its own," writes Matt Campbell of Arkansas' "Blue Hog Report", which was on this story from the jump.

"However, the bigger implication is Article 19, section 3, of the Arkansas Constitution," he adds, which states: "No persons shall be elected to, or appointed to fill a vacancy in, any office who does not possess the qualifications of an elector." If Rutledge is not registered in Arkansas, she no longer "possess[es] the qualifications of an elector."

But, believe it or not, none of that is the actual ironic part that Hasen was referring to in his piece on this today. Yes, it gets even more ironic!...

Early last week, with little attention in the media, the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeal applied the brakes, for now, to one of the newest voter suppression schemes on the bleeding front edge of the GOP's ongoing War on Voting.

The insidious new Republican scheme, if it manages to overcome continuing challenges in court, such as the stay and appeal it now faces in the 10th Circuit, could result in thousands of otherwise eligible voters in Kansas and Arizona (and elsewhere, if the effort is allowed to move forward in KS and AZ) unable to even register to vote, much less cast a ballot on Election Day.

An investigative report by the Arizona Republic last year found the evidence for the purported basis of the new law --- claims by Republicans that non-citizens are casting ballots in the state --- to be "nearly non-existent".

Judith Brown Dianis, a civil rights litigator at The Advancement Project, described the nearly decade-long, coordinated, nationwide GOP voter suppression effort as "the largest legislative effort to roll back voting rights since the post-Reconstruction era". While appearing before a U.S. Senate Subcommittee in 2011, she described the effort as one designed to make "it harder to register to vote, harder to cast a ballot and harder to have a vote counted."

One of the primary GOP efforts to make it "harder to cast a ballot" can be found in the spate of polling place Photo ID laws that Republicans have sought to justify on the basis of what amounts to a phantom menace. Cases of in-person voter impersonation --- the only type of voter fraud that can be prevented by Photo ID --- are about as scarce as hen's teeth.

The same can be said about baseless GOP claims of an epidemic of voter fraud in the form of votes cast by non-citizens --- an allegation that is now being used as part of the new Republican ploy to prevent perfectly lawful citizens from even registering to vote...

The Department of Justice (DoJ) will not idly remain on the sidelines as the GOP seeks to illegally game the electoral system in the wake of what U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder referred to as the "deeply disappointing and flawed" Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder.

That decision, which carved out the very heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by finding unconstitutional the formula used to determine which jurisdictions with a long history of racial discrimination are required to "pre-clear" new election laws with the federal government before they can be enacted, has been a dramatic "setback", as Holder described it, to the voting rights movement, and has even proven to be a great leap forward for vote suppressors.

But, in a speech last week to the National Urban League Conference in Philadelphia, Holder signaled his intentions to fight back against the activist Court:

The DoJ then promptly filed a July 25, 2013 "Statement of Interest" in Perez v. Texas, a federal court case challenging the imposition of new Congressional redistricting maps in the wake of the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act, despite the fact that both the DoJ and a panel of federal judges nixed the same map last year after it was found to have been purposefully discriminatory just last year.

The DoJ argued in its filing last week that, because the evidence presented both in Perez and in Texas v. United States, revealed intentional violations of the 14th and 15th amendments in the redistricting schemes at issue, the court should impose a ten year preclearance requirement upon the State of Texas as an equitable remedy available pursuant to Section 3(c) of the VRA.

In short, while SCOTUS gutted the VRA's existing Section 4 formula for determining jurisdictions to be covered by Section 5 pre-clearance requirements, it left Section 3, which allows for jurisdictions to be added or "bailed in" to the list of those subject to preclearance intact. The DoJ now wants Texas added to the list of such jurisdictions.

It is of critical importance to note, however, that Holder's Urban League speech made clear that his intentions of pushing back were neither limited to Texas nor to Section 3.

"This is the Department’s first action to protect voting rights following the Shelby County decision, but it will not be our last," Holder vowed.

He then stated (emphasis added): "My colleagues and I are determined to use every tool at our disposal to stand against discrimination wherever it is found."

As observed by University of California Irvine Law Prof. Rick Hasen, Holder's pledge to have the DoJ "use whatever tools it has remaining in its arsenal to protect minority voting rights" is "a big deal."

It's a "big deal" not just because of the creative use of Section 3 in Perez, but also because the DoJ is joining a case originally brought "under Section 2 of the [VRA] to enforce the guarantees of the [14th & 15th] Amendments against racial discrimination in voting." The DoJ's actions here suggests that they are finally prepared to add the power and resources of the federal government to legal efforts to protect the right to vote that had been primarily made during the last election cycle by privately-funded, public interest groups like the ACLU and League of Women Voters...

In a ruling hailed by voting rights advocates today, Arizona's requirement that newly registered voters submit proof of citizenship with their registration has been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision. Justice Antonin Scalia authored the opinion for the majority, while Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

The court rejected provisions of Proposition 200, a ballot measure approved by AZ voters in 2004, which mandated that state election officials reject all applications to register to vote that did not include documentary proof of citizenship. Those documents, however, are not currently required by the Federal Form for voter registration, as approved by the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) pursuant to provisions of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).

Today's ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona [PDF], is grounded upon the plenary power given to Congress by the Elections Clause (Art. I §4 of the U.S. Constitution) empowering Congress to preempt state regulations governing the "Times, Places and Manner" of holding federal elections. The court found that the NVRA mandate that states "accept and use" the Federal Form for voter registration takes precedence, and that Prop 200 is invalid because it conflicts with the Congressional intent that the NVRA help ease the ability of citizens to register to vote.

Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia observed that if a state could "demand of Federal Form applicants every additional piece of information the State requires…the Federal Form ceases to perform any meaningful function, and would be a feeble means of 'increas[ing] the number of eligible citizens who register to vote in elections for Federal office.'"

This does not close the door on the issue altogether, however. Justice Scalia noted that, pursuant to the NVRA, any state can ask that "the EAC alter the Federal Form to include information the State deems necessary to determine eligibility." If the EAC then rejects such a request, the state "may challenge the EAC's rejection of that request [in court]"...