Even though we pride ourselves as a beacon of democracy around the world, a recent Pew Report revealed that we are falling far short of our ideals. We are one of the few democratic nations in the world that imposes on voters the burden of registration. This has significant costs, both in real dollars and to our democracy. In this modern age, our registration system is almost entirely paper-based. When this is coupled with the requirement that voters re-register each time they move in our highly mobile world, it is hardly shocking that nearly a quarter of eligible voters remain unregistered and that this burden falls disproportionately on the mobile, young, low-income, and those serving in our nation’s armed services. The study’s findings are especially dismaying in light of the sustained attack on our fundamental right to vote, which willfully ignores the real problems plaguing our system of elections.

Not too long ago, a rebellious, renegade body known as the United States Congress declared, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right; It is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right; and Discriminatory and unfair registration laws and procedures can have a direct and damaging effect on voter participation in elections for Federal office and disproportionately harm voter participation by various groups, including racial minorities.”

By enacting the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA, more commonly known as the “motor voter” law) in 1993, Congress sought to increase registration opportunities—by making registration more convenient to voters. This law was a true breakthrough: Not only would the government now serve voters’ needs, the law required public assistance agencies and those serving the disabled to offer comprehensive voter registration registration opportunities.

The proposal to expand registration opportunities to low-income and marginalized Americans was hotly contested. Opponents argued that this was a mere partisan conspiracy designed to increase turnout for one party and that opening up public assistance and disability assistance agencies to voter registration would invite fraud.

In response to this suspicion and fear mongering, the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota implored for extending the government’s reach to the underserved, stating, “The only conspiracy to this particular bill is a conspiracy of political participation: the conspiracy of voter registration; the conspiracy of voter turnout; the conspiracy of expanding democracy; the conspiracy of encouraging and enabling people to participate in the political process in America.”

Nonetheless, state governments continue to defy this critical law. In response, the ACLU, along with its partners, recently sued the State of Georgia for denying lower-income and disabled voters the opportunity to participate in our democracy. We will continue our fight in states like Senator Wellstone’s own Minnesota, where legislators are contemplating a constitutional amendment to require voter ID, and in South Carolina, which may severely restrict voter registration drives by burdening them with unnecessary restrictions and fines.

Take action and help us stop these misguided laws. Join us in our conspiracy to preserve democracy.

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One of the hardest-fought civil liberties battles of the George W. Bush era involved the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the post-Watergate statute that was meant to rein in domestic surveillance undertaken in the name of national security. It's almost certain that we'll have an equally hard-fought battle over FISA this year, both in the courts and in Congress.

The first volley may come as early as next week, because the administration must decide by Tuesday whether to ask the Supreme Court to intervene in the ACLU's constitutional challenge to the FISA Amendments Act, the 2008 law that ratified and expanded the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. And that law is scheduled to sunset in December, which means that the litigation will unfold against the background of a congressional reauthorization debate.

To understand the significance of this brewing battle, you need to know (or recall) a little history.

Right after 9/11, President Bush instructed the National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept Americans' telephone calls without first obtaining warrants. The program was developed in secret but exposed by The New York Times in 2005 and immediately challenged by civil liberties groups, including the ACLU. In response to public pressure, and in an effort to derail the legal challenges, the Bush administration announced in January 2006 that it would allow the program to be supervised by the judiciary — specifically, by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the entity established by FISA to oversee domestic intelligence surveillance. Though there were unanswered questions — for example, what, precisely, did the administration submit to the FISA Court, and what did the FISA Court approve? — it seemed, briefly, like a victory for civil liberties.

But the FISA Court reconsidered its endorsement of the warrantless wiretapping program only a few months later, and the administration and its allies in Congress began to press for legislative change. It was a misleading campaign. If there was a problem with FISA as written, the problem was narrow and could have been addressed with a minor legislative fix that no one would have opposed. The administration, though, was not interested in fixing the narrow problem it had identified; it was interested in allowing the NSA to turn its powerful technology inward, towards the United States. This is what it asked Congress to permit.

And this, ultimately, is what Congress allowed. Congress weakened FISA in 2007 and then again in 2008 to permit the warrantless wiretapping that the law had previously prohibited. It granted retroactive immunity to the companies that had facilitated the warrantless wiretapping program. And it gave the NSA unprecedented power to monitor the international communications of people living in the United States — to listen to their phone calls, and to read their emails. "We are targeting our own country," one NSA whistleblower observed. Marty Lederman, then a law professor but later a lawyer for the Obama administration, explained the 2008 amendments like this:

The new statute permits the NSA to intercept phone calls and e-mails between the U.S. and a foreign location, without making any showing to a court and without judicial oversight, whether or not the communication has anything to do with al Qaeda — indeed, even if there is no evidence that the communication has anything to do with terrorism, or any threat to national security.

Predictably, the NSA has not simply used the law aggressively but abused it as well.

Congress's 2008 amendments to FISA are scheduled to sunset in December, and over the next 10 months the ACLU and its partners will be urging Congress to fix FISA's problematic provisions and rein in the NSA.

We'll also be pressing the constitutional challenge we filed less than an hour after the 2008 amendments became law. In that case we represent a coalition of labor, media, and human rights organizations whose work depends on their ability to communicate confidentially with clients, witnesses, sources, and victims of human rights abuses. (Profiles of our clients are here.) The government has tried to keep the case out of court; it's argued that our clients lack standing to challenge the 2008 Act because they can't prove that their communications were (or will be) monitored under it. Some courts have accepted that cynical argument, but early last year a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected it, and late last year the full Second Circuit declined the government's request to reconsider that ruling. The Obama administration must decide by Tuesday whether to ask the Supreme Court to intervene.

As we've said before, our hope is that the Obama administration will drop its objection to our plaintiffs' standing and allow the constitutionality of the FISA amendments to be tested in court. For a full decade, the executive branch — first the Bush administration and now the Obama administration — has used the standing and "state secrets" doctrines to insulate its most intrusive surveillance activities from public oversight and judicial review. But the Constitution doesn't contemplate that core democratic rights — the right to privacy, the freedoms of association and expression — will be left to the mercy of the political branches. The courts have a role to play in ensuring that government surveillance complies with the Constitution. We'll find out on Tuesday whether the Obama administration is finally willing to let the courts play that role.

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Today, the Florida Senate averted disaster by voting down a proposal to create the largest private prison system in America. The plan would have turned over nearly 30 Florida correctional facilities to private, for-profit companies, which have would run the prisons under contract with the state.

Florida operates the third-largest prison system in the United States, a $2.2 billion-a-year enterprise overseeing nearly 101,000 inmates and another 112,800 on community supervision. The prison population has nearly quadrupled since harsh sentencing laws were passed in the 1980s – Florida incarcerated just 26,471 people in 1980.

If lawmakers want to save money in our prison system, they should reform mandatory minimum sentencing, invest in re-entry programs and re-visit parole policies that feed the addiction to incarceration and throw people into the revolving door that is our prison system. Privatization schemes, often coupled with inflated claims of cost savings, distract policymakers from an inescapable truth: The best way to reduce prison spending is to reduce the number of people we imprison.

The defeat of the privatization bill is a victory for Florida. As Julie Ebenstein, Policy & Advocacy Counsel at the ACLU of Florida, explained shortly after the bill’s defeat: “Florida’s prison system needs reform, but private prisons aren’t reform – they deform the process by linking corporate profit to incarceration. The bottom line is that private prisons make money by keeping people in prison when we should be looking for ways to keep them out in the first place.” For more on the problematic incentives injected into incarceration by the profit motive, see Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration, the ACLU’s recent, comprehensive report on the private prison industry.

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In his 2007 State of the State address, Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) aptly explained, “I believe we can take an approach to crime that is both tough and smart…[T]here are thousands of non-violent offenders in the system whose future we cannot ignore. Let’s focus more resources on rehabilitating those offenders so we can ultimately spend less money locking them up again.”

Gov. Perry is just one voice in the chorus of policymakers, from both sides of the political aisle, calling for serious criminal justice reform that promotes public safety, reduces unsustainable prison populations and saves scarce taxpayer dollars. Elected officials like Gov. Perry are beginning to put their money where their mouths are by passing reform legislation to address overincarceration.

For example, in 2008, former Gov. Haley Barbour (R- Miss.) signed legislation that allowed all incarcerated individuals convicted of nonviolent felonies to be eligible for parole after serving 25 percent of their sentences. In Kansas, conservative lawmakers mandated community-based drug abuse treatment and community supervision for nonviolent offenders convicted of drug possession for the first or second time. And last year, in Ohio, a Republican-majority legislature passed a measure that is projected to save $1 billion over the next four years by — among other things — increasing the amount of time a prisoner can earn toward early release, eliminating the crack-cocaine sentencing disparity, removing mandatory minimum sentences for certain low-level drug offenses and increasing the use of diversion programs for low-level drug offenders.

Many other states, including Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia, have also passed legislation that will reduce corrections spending, enhance public safety, and increase justice. A more detailed discussion of these reforms can be found in the ACLU’s recently released report, Promising Beginnings: Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform in Key States.

While the reforms discussed in this report do not represent the final solution to our incarceration crisis, it is encouraging to know that legislators in a variety of states are working in a bipartisan manner to thoughtfully address this serious problem. Given the successes of these state initiatives, now is the time for Members of Congress to put aside petty politics and pass the National Criminal Justice Commission Act (S. 306), which would create a bipartisan commission tasked with examining the nation’s criminal justice system and offering reform recommendations in a number of important areas including sentencing policy, law enforcement, crime prevention and re-entry.

With over 2.2 million people incarcerated in local jails or in state or federal prisons, now is the time for the federal government to follow the lead of the states and take a holistic look at the justice system.

As the bill’s author, Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) explained on the Senate Floor, “Nowhere is the need to think creatively for the good of the country more clear than where it affects our dysfunctional criminal justice system, whose challenges threaten the safety and the well-being of every single community and every single American. This system will not be fixed by sticking our heads in the sand and pretending not to see its failings. It will only be fixed by bringing together good minds who have dedicated years of thought and action to finding the answers.”

Take action now. Tell Congress to support meaningful reform by passing the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2011.

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