And in Florida, the Dick State

Mother Jones:

If the GOP prevails in the Sunshine State on November 6, it won't be because of hanging chads -- though there have been plenty of issues with Florida's paperless digital machines. Instead, it might owe something to Gov. Rick Scott's now infamous… new voting laws Florida passed last year. Or the fact that about a million voting-age Floridians will be sitting on their hands this Election Day -- permanently stricken from the voting rolls because they were once convicted of a felony…. [A]ny former felon who want[s] to regain voting rights [must now] appeal directly to the governor. Those with a nonviolent felony must wait five years before applying for a clemency board hearing; others must wait seven years. "Essentially," the Brennan Center points out, "the new rules give the governor, an elected official, the power to decide who will (or won't) be allowed to vote in the next election." According to Desmond Meade of the nonprofit Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, "Over 1 million people in Florida right now are disenfranchised," he says. Nearly 1 in 3 of them are African American men. If these people were able to vote, Meade continues, "Florida would no longer be a swing state."

Over at eletoral-vote.com, Florida, with its key 29 electoral votes, is presently designated "barely Democratic" based on extensive polling in that state. But does the polling reflect the reality of the electoral landscape engineered by Republicans for 2012?