Rick Pildes, to NBC News

The latest round of letters questioning the citizenship of some Colorado registered voters has 63 out of 298 people affirming their right to vote, and most recipients are ignoring the May letters altogether.

The letters are part of an ongoing effort by Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler to address what he says is a risk for voter fraud. Gessler’s office provided the latest numbers to The Associated Press this week. Another 15 people who received letters last month said they weren’t U.S. citizens and asked to be removed from voter rolls.

A Denver grand jury ruled Wednesday that Secretary of State Scott Gessler did not violate the law when he used his office’s discretionary fund to pay about $1,300 to attend the Republican National Lawyers Association meeting in Sarasota in August.

However, the panel rebuked Gessler for using state money on the trip, and the secretary’s subsequent trip to the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

Seems like a winner for the HDP given Supreme Court precedent.

It is time for the Court to grant cert. in one of these cases.  (The Court denied cert. in Siegelman, and a few people have suggested to me that it was not a good vehicle for exploring these issues because there may have been enough evidence of defendants’ guilt under whatever standard the Court could announce.)  But now via BNA comes word of a cert. petition from Kevin Ring, of the Abramoff scandal, raising these issues.I don’t know enough about whether the Ring case is a better vehicle for exploring these issues, but I hope it is.

What’s at stake in these cases is the troubling criminalization of politics, where no one knows where the line is (this is a lot like the IRS 501(c)(4) problem, where not even the IRS knows where the line is, but this time there is criminal liability on the line). Here’s what I wrote on the broader issue in a Slate jurisprudence column last year:  “If politics makes for strange bedfellows, so too it seems do political prosecutions.”

Another snippet:

First, if the law is murky, prosecutors with a political agenda could use criminal prosecutions to take down their political enemies. Siegelman, Edwards, and DeLay each claimed that the prosecutions against them were politically motivated: Siegelman and Edwards blame Bush administration Justice Department prosecutors, while DeLay blames former Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle, a Democrat.

We don’t know whether these prosecutions were politically motivated or not, and of course each of these defendants has every incentive to make such claims. But the point is that when judges allow prosecutors to rely on novel legal theories in these sorts of cases, they open up the possibility of politically motivated prosecutions. Better to leave the criminal cases to clear violations of the law, such as Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s yacht bribe or Rep. William Jefferson’s $10,000 stash hidden in his freezer. If prosecutors can’t produce clear-cut charges, politicians and their campaigns should only face the potential for civil liability.

On June 18, U.S. District Court Judge William J. Haynes ruled that Tennessee’s law, giving the two largest parties the best spots on the general election ballot, is unconstitutional. He also again struck down the law that requires newly-qualifying parties to submit 40,042 valid signatures (2.5% of the last gubernatorial vote).

Judge Haynes had struck down the number of signatures in the same case, but the Sixth Circuit had remanded the case back to him, and requested that he review the number of signatures again. The Sixth Circuit mentioned that in 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld Georgia’s petition requirement of 5% of the number of registered voters. In response, Judge Haynes reaffirmed his original decision, pointing out that Tennessee is obviously not concerned about crowded ballots, because it allows presidential primary candidates to get on the ballot with only 2,500 signatures; and it lets all candidates for other office get on primary ballots with only 25 signatures. Also he mentioned that Tennessee lets independent candidates get on the ballot for President with 275 signatures and independent candidates for all other office only need 25 signatures.

The part of the decision on ballot order of candidates is surely the most thorough court opinion on that subject ever written. The opinion contains an exhaustive report on research on whether ballot access order affects voting behavior.

The House Oversight Committee’s top Democrat on Tuesday released the full transcript of a congressional interview that he said “debunks conspiracy theories” about the IRS targeting controversy.