Across Texas, election officials are required to send out new voter registration cards to all 11.6 million active voters no later than Wednesday, under deadlines set by a federal judge who oversaw the redistricting case. Some counties already sent out their cards, but Secretary of State Spokesman Rich Parsons said he could not confirm how many would meet the judge-imposed time limit.

Renee Fleming, a business service network representative with the U.S. Postal Service, oversaw the delivery of 6,255 pounds of cards at the Houston downtown post office on Tuesday. Somewhere in seven stacks of cards was her own voter registration card, which she first got after moving to Harris County in 1981.

“I’m waiting for it – I’m not going to dig through that,” Fleming said.

Statewide, however, about 1.3 million registered voters, nearly 1 in 10, won’t get a new card this week because they are listed as being “in suspense” – which typically means officials lack a valid address for them. In Harris County, one in five voters under 30 is “in suspense,” mainly because younger voters tend to move a lot.

“The bulk is people who have moved and not updated their addresses,” said Harris County voter registration manager Tom Moon. “They can still vote – they’re not ‘unregistered.’ ”

Any Texas voter who doesn’t receive a new yellow registration card soon – and hasn’t moved out of county – can vote with a valid ID. However, voters should check their registration status and update addresses or re-register by midnight on April 30 to avoid problems or paperwork at the polls, if they plan to vote in the May 29 primaries, Parsons said.

Voters can update addresses online if they remained in the same county and have a Texas driver’s license.

In Harris County, about 6,000 voters who registered for the first time in 2012 should expect to get their cards one to two weeks later than everyone else, Moon said

With a mere 32 percent of adult Texans older than 25 with at least an associate degree, the study notes, Texas ranks 39th among states. University of Pennsylvania researchers Joni Finney and Laura Perna conducted the study in conjunction with Patrick Callan of the National Center for Public Policy.

“We wanted to look at a large state that had a very fast-growing Latino population, because the country is changing that way, obviously,” Finney told The Texas Tribune. The study is the fourth in a series of five reports they are doing on higher-education policy in different states.

To remain economically competitive, the state needs to produce more graduates, the study says. But public higher education is getting less affordable — according to the report, students in 2009 were paying 72 percent more for college than they were six years prior, when the Legislature deregulated tuition.

“Texas was once known as a state where low financial aid was offset by low tuition,” the authors write in the report. “Now, the low tuition is gone, leaving only low financial aid.”

The state also faces some stark racial and economic disparities in educational attainment, which, unless they are addressed, could exacerbate the state’s completion crisis as demographics shift. Despite these many moving parts, Finney did note that the state’s “Closing the Gaps” plan addresses these issues. That plan seeks to bring Texas’ higher-education performance up to par with other states by 2015 — with a broad base support that Finney said she has not found in other states.

But she said the “Closing the Gaps” goals are unlikely to be reached unless the state addresses the financing of community colleges and reconsiders its investment in building more national research universities.

The majority of the state’s first-year college students are in community colleges, and that share is expected to grow. As tuition rises at four-year universities, many students opt — and are even encouraged — to begin at the cheaper two-year institutions.

The report points out that the share of community college expenses covered by state appropriations fell from 61 percent in 1985 to 28 percent in 2007. And local taxes have not filled the gap.

Meanwhile, in the last few years, millions have been invested in incentive programs to turn a handful of schools into the next top-tier research universities. The authors characterize this “ambitious goal” as being at odds with the state’s need to focus on boosting student success. They contend that the tier-one effort reveals “little understanding of the serious policy tradeoffs that must be considered if Texas is to achieve significantly higher levels of educational attainment.”

One of the arguments for creating more tier one universities in Texas is that California has significantly more of them. “I was in California for 15 years,” Finney said, “and if you look at what’s happening now, they have clearly traded off supporting that sector and reducing access to poor and minority people. Does Texas want to make that tradeoff, and do they even realize what it’s going to take to [build more research universities]?”

State Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas, who authored the bill that created the tier-one race in 2009, said he didn’t feel that the two goals — creating more research universities and encouraging more students to graduate — were “mutually exclusive.”

Of the tier-one initiative, Branch said, “That is a healthy competition that is good for the brands of those universities, which will attract Texas students to stay in the state and go to those universities. We have a need for colleges and universities that our students desire to go to. ”

Branch said that, beyond the questioning of the investment in research universities, much of the analysis resonated with things he has heard as the chairman of the House Higher Education Committee. Other careful observers of Texas higher education also said the report was an accurate read of the situation.

“I think they hit the nail on the head that the most important challenge that Texas policymakers need to consider is the education of Hispanic students at every level,” said Harrison Keller, vice provost of higher education policy and research at the University of Texas.

Aims McGuinness, a senior associate with the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, said that sorting out the state’s priorities and addressing the state’s lagging rate of student success are both essential for the state’s future.

“There’s virtually no way the state, at the current level of degree production, can get to globally competitive levels of higher-education attainment,” he said. “And there is no money. I mean, there is no money anywhere.”

In the 1950s, more than 55 percent of all federal taxes paid came from businesses and less than 45 percent came from individuals. Today, that is reversed, and the disparity is widening, increasing the feeling that folks working hard and playing by the rules are paying more, while the wealthiest and big corporations are not paying their fair share.

The sad truth is that perks, tax breaks and loopholes for the wealthy have perverted our tax system and made it blatantly unfair for most average Americans. For instance, in 2010, General Electric – with profits of more than $14.2 billion – paid not a single penny in taxes, thanks to loopholes in the tax code. In fact, GE actually got a $3.2 billion tax benefit, and they weren’t alone. A 2008 Government Accountability Office study found that 55 percent of United States companies paid zero federal income taxes during at least one year of the seven-year period it studied. Another recent study showed that 26 major corporations – like Verizon, Mattel and Boeing – paid no federal income tax over the last four years.

Unfortunately, Texas is no different, as our tax code is riddled with tax breaks, giveaways and loopholes that were put in place years ago by special interests and have never been reviewed. It is such a problem that, despite repeated requests to numerous agencies, no one at the state level could tell me how much we lose in tax breaks and targeted incentives because no one even knows how many are in the code, how much they cost, or if they are even working. What little we do know, however, is startling.

Texas gave retailers a tax break of more than $200 million in 2010 simply to file their sales taxes on time. Enormous and very profitable national corporations owe hundreds of millions in state sales taxes, but use a loophole to avoid paying. The 2012-13 budget, while cutting funding for our public schools and nursing homes, even included $32 million to subsidize Hollywood movies.

The “high cost” natural gas loophole is particularly wasteful. This tax incentive was created in 1989 to help companies with the costs of drilling high-cost wells. Now, however, virtually every new well produced is a “high-cost” well, meaning all new drilling receives an incentive to do what they are already going to do. As a result, Texas gave away more than $7.4 billion in tax breaks from 2004 to 2009, and from new drills established in 2009 alone, we will lose another $7.9 billion over the next decade. Mom and pop producers are not the ones getting this tax break. Instead, it’s international companies with billions of dollars in profits that use this out-of-date loophole to pad their bottom lines with millions of dollars that should have gone to support our public schools and avoid teacher layoffs.

That’s not smart and it’s not fair. Texas can do better.

We need accountability measures, checks and balances on corporate welfare and tax giveaways just like every other government program to prevent wasteful spending in these tough economic times. That’s why I’ve pushed for legislation to scrub, sunset and possibly repeal scores of preferential tax breaks in the Texas budget. State agencies are subjected to a “sunset review” every 12 years to determine if their functions need to be continued. The tax code would benefit from a similar periodic review of all its exemptions, exclusions and special treatments to answer one simple question: Are they working?

This is not a radical idea. Oregon recently enacted legislation requiring most of its tax credits to sunset every six years, Nevada’s constitution requires that all new tax exemptions be created with a sunset provision, and Washington state has implemented a 10-year performance review cycle for their tax breaks. Texas should step forward and make real reforms to ensure fairness and efficiency.

At a time that those in control of the Capitol force cuts to public education, health care and financial aid, the public must respond by demanding an accurate picture of the entire state budget. That necessarily includes the tax breaks and loopholes that were put in place – many for a valid reason – but have never been reviewed for their effectiveness or continued need. For the future of our state, Texas must do better.

Last year, Texas chose to deal with its $27 billion budget shortfall by irresponsibly cutting vital services for Texas families and our schools, rather than address our fundamentally unfair and ineffective tax system. Next year, we will again face a huge budget deficit and the same choice: Do we punish Texas schoolchildren and families, or do we do the right thing and eliminate wasteful tax loopholes, simplify the system and treat everybody fairly? How that question is answered will tell us a lot about where Texas’ priorities lie.

Ellis, a Democrat, represents Texas Senate District 13.

What is a humdrum routine for millions of students around the country — riding to and from school on a yellow bus — has become a thing of the past for Aubrey. Faced with a budget shortfall, the Hutto Independent School District stopped providing bus service to students who live within a two-mile walk of a campus. The move saved the district $25,000.

Aubrey, a sophomore at Hutto High School, now spends 20 minutes walking one mile to school in the morning and another 20 minutes on the return trip in the afternoon.

“I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m not going to have a bus?’” he said. “I’ve walked home one time when it was raining. I didn’t like it at all. I was soaked.”

For Hutto and the 1,264 other public school districts in Texas, this has been the year of doing without. Texas lawmakers cut public education financing by roughly $5.4 billion to balance the state’s two-year budget during the last legislative session, with the cuts taking effect this school year and next.

The budget reductions that districts large and small have had to make have transformed school life in a host of ways — increasing class sizes, reducing services and supplies and thinning the ranks of teachers, custodians, librarians and others, school administrators said.

Like chief executives of struggling corporations, superintendents have been cutting back on everything from paper to nurses and have had to become increasingly creative about generating revenue. They are selling advertising space on the sides of buses and on district websites, scaling back summer school, charging parents if their children take part in athletics or cheerleading and adding periods in the school day so fewer teachers can accommodate more students.

In suburban Fort Worth, the Keller Independent School District started charging parents for bus service. The fee, which ranges this year from $185 to $355 for one student, is expected to bring in about $1 million, no small amount for a district that eliminated 100 positions, got rid of some of its sports teams and no longer has uniformed officers providing security after it canceled contracts with local police agencies.

One Central Texas district, Dripping Springs, reduced its custodial staff and has relied on teachers to pick up the slack. Janitors now visit the classrooms every other day, leaving teachers to clean and sweep their rooms on the off days. Off day or on, teachers also must collect their trash and set it in the hallway, part of custodial changes aimed at saving the district $149,000.

To cut $1.5 million, the Northwest district in the Fort Worth area also stopped busing students who live within a two-mile walk of their school. “It’s buses or teachers, and we’re choosing teachers,” the superintendent, Karen G. Rue, said. “That’s what it came down to, plain and simple.”

In Hutto, a district with 5,600 students and one high school, administrators cut $4 million from this school year’s budget, eliminating 68 positions and taking the unusual step of temporarily shutting one of its elementary schools. The school, Veterans’ Hill Elementary, will stay closed for two years to save the district $1 million annually, and its 500 students, including two of the superintendent’s children, are being sent to other schools. The only way to transfer the students was to take another unusual step: All fifth-graders were moved out of elementary schools and into middle schools.

The district must trim an additional $1.2 million for next school year, and proposals include charging for bus service, canceling instructional field trips and eliminating music and art teachers in elementary schools.

“It’s almost like slow death,” said superintendent Douglas Killian. “We’re being picked apart. It’s made a tremendous morale issue in the district. I’ve noticed that folks are a lot more on edge.”

Several lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Legislature have played down the impact of the $5.4 billion in cuts on schools statewide. In an interview in February with the Dallas Morning News, Gov. Rick Perry said he saw no need for a special legislative session to restore some of the education funding that was eliminated. “How that money’s spent is the bigger issue,” he told the newspaper.

But many public school advocates, parents and administrators said the reductions that districts had made — and were considering for the next school year — had reached an unprecedented level, even as enrollment and testing requirements have increased. Hundreds of districts have sued the state in four lawsuits, saying that the school finance system fails to adequately and equitably pay for public education in Texas.

From the previous school year to the current one, districts across Texas eliminated 25,286 positions through retirements, resignations and layoffs, including 10,717 teaching jobs, according to state data analyzed by Children at Risk, a nonprofit advocacy group in Houston. Texas public schools spend $8,908 per student, a decrease of $538 from the previous year and below the national average of $11,463, according to the National Education Association.

“I’ve been in education 42 years, and I’ve been a superintendent about 25 of those 42 years, and this is the worst that I’ve ever had to cut,” said John Folks, the superintendent of one of the districts suing the state, Northside in San Antonio, where officials eliminated 973 positions and made classes larger in a $61.4 million budget reduction. “We cut about 40 special education teachers. We cut about 28 athletic coaches. We froze salaries. School districts can’t take much more than this.”

At Hutto High School, Eric Soto, a world history teacher who is also the head softball coach and assistant volleyball coach, worries about the bottom line about as much as he worries about his classes and his games. He makes fewer photocopies, to save printing costs. He helped sell advertising space along the fence on the softball field, to bring in extra cash for the team. When teaching, he turns on only one of the room’s two light switches, to save on electricity.

Last year Soto taught four classes, but now he has five. He is working 12 to 20 more hours per week, both on the clock and off, though his athletic bonus has been cut by about $2,000 and district teachers have not received a raise in two years.

“I would say this year would be one of the years where I’m more fatigued,” Soto said. “However, at the same time, I’ve actually found myself become more creative as a teacher. It’s all about making adjustments, and it’s all about adapting to the cards that we’re dealt.”

One in seven children in Bexar County lacks health insurance, which is higher than the national average but better than all but 14 other counties in the state, according to the study by the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin research and advocacy group that focuses on the needs of low-income Texans.

“Still, the ranking (of 15th) says something about the system and the state when you can be in the top 20 and still have 17 percent of children without health insurance,” said Frances Deviney, who discussed the center’s study, “Choices: The State of Texas Children in 2012” on Thursday.

Deviney spoke before more than 300 policymakers, nonprofit officials and service providers in San Antonio, releasing a flood of data that compares the progress — or lack thereof — in the status of families and children in Texas over the past decade.

Recent years have seen an increase in Texas children receiving public services — something Deviney said was a positive sign, since it shows more eligible low-income families are signing up for and getting help, even as economic turmoil makes such help necessary.

In Bexar County, the proportion of kids receiving food stamps nearly tripled, from 11 percent in 2000 to 29 percent in 2010. Those enrolled in Medicaid also rose 70 percent, from 19.6 percent in 2000 to 33.4 percent in 2010, an increase Deviney attributed to reduced barriers to enrollment, more staff and other improvements.

But cuts by the Legislature in 2011 to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program — and in other areas such as public education, dropout prevention and child abuse/neglect prevention services — are going to prove “penny-wise and pound-foolish,” Deviney said.

She was especially critical of the $73 million cut to state family planning programs — a 66 percent reduction. Coupled with the recent end of federal funding for the Women’s Health Program — which died over a political fight concerning the inclusion of Planned Parenthood — many low-income Texas women will lose access to contraception and preventive health screenings, Deviney said.

“We do expect to see an additional 20,000 births, paid for by Medicaid, which is going to cost Texans an additional $100 million,” she said.

There is some good news, she added: The percentage of births to girls ages 13-19 dropped from 16.1 percent in 1998 to 13.6 percent in 2008. Still, Texas ranks No. 2 for teens having more than one baby.

In the past decade, 2 million children were added to the U.S. population, with Texas accounting for half of that growth.

Regarding the various child well-being indicators — poverty, health care, education and so on — Bexar County’s children fare “somewhat in the middle,” Deviney said.

“But kids in Texas are in the middle of a tug of war when it comes to decision-makers deciding what the priorities are,” she said. “We’ve got to start putting children and families first. If we don’t do that, we’re not going to remain the No. 1 state to do business in.”

Added state Rep. Mike Villarreal, D-San Antonio: “We need to stop defining this as a partisan issue. This is about the future of our community.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which prepared the report, said Texas must work not just to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, but to prepare for rising sea levels and declining water supplies.

The environmental group lumped Texas with 11 other states that have no strategy for responding to the effects of climate change, particularly those related to water. Texas’ ongoing drought clearly shows its vulnerability to higher temperatures and changes in rainfall, said Steve Fleischli, director of the NRDC’s water and climate program.

“This is a call to action, not a call for alarm,” Fleischli said.

‘Past is not prologue’

The report noted that Texas has some policies, including increasing water conservation, that could be beneficial in adapting to a warming planet. Yet, Texas officials missed a key opportunity by not giving “explicit consideration” to the impacts of climate change in the 2012 version of the state’s long-range water-supply plan by calling it an “ambiguous risk,” Fleischli said

Texas officials also unwisely use the 1950s drought as the marker for the worst-case dry spell in state history – even while acknowledging the possibility of warmer and drier conditions because of climate change, he said.

State water planners “need to understand that the past is not prologue,” Fleischli said.

The Texas Water Development Board said it used the 1950s drought as a benchmark because there was not enough information available to determine the impacts of climate change over the next 50 years.

The plan is updated every five years, allowing the state to adjust “when sufficient information is available to warrant change,” said Carolyn Brittin, deputy executive administrator of water resources planning and information at TWDB.

The $53 billion plan calls for more reservoirs, desalination plants and pipelines, among other projects, to avoid grave water shortages over the next half-century.

The NRDC said the state instead should prioritize more aggressive water conservation and reuse strategies to meet long-range needs.

At the same time, Texas should do more to plan for rising sea levels caused by climate change, the group said. The risk includes increasingly frequent flooding and greater coastal erosion.

‘Texans deserve more’

While the Texas Sea Grant program has helped the Galveston Bay area prepare for the ocean’s rise, the state does not have a comprehensive strategy, the report said.

“Texans deserve more and should demand that their state government address climate change risks like many other states are doing,” Fleischli said.

The environmental group ranked California, Maryland and New York among the nine most prepared states.

In addition to Texas, the least prepared states included Alabama, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio.

Being a grateful cancer survivor made me realize we need a greater awareness that cancer impacts minority groups in ways that differ from the general population. My legislation, House Bill 114, was enacted last legislative session to dedicate April in Texas as a month in which to increase awareness among minority populations and among the general population, at no expense to the public.

Cancer is sneaky, and it picks its victims differently. The Texas Cancer Registry data shows that the burden of cancer disproportionately impacts racial and ethnic groups. For instance, minorities are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer at a later stage, meaning treatment can be less successful. Minorities continue to have lower screening rates and less physical activity. Also, minorities in general consume a less healthy diet than whites, all of which contributes to higher mortality rates.

Prevention is an important piece of the picture, but we cannot stop there.

According to Ian M. Thompson Jr, M.D., director of the Cancer Therapy & Research Center at the UT Health Science Center San Antonio, “Cancer does not strike evenly across regions or across different ethnic groups. African American women rank second in the rate of breast cancer incidence, but they have the highest mortality rate. The high rate of liver cancer among Hispanics in South Texas is unusual enough that the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas has provided a research grant to CTRC to find out why.” Clearly, they are committed to the cause.

Mortality rates show that the combined lack of early screening and access to care shortens the lives of African Americans and Hispanics needlessly. Every case of cancer affects us all — at home, in the workplace, and in our communities. Time is lost at work; the health care system incurs increased costs; and families can lose their moms, dads and grandparents, and sometimes even children. It is time to turn that around with greater awareness and action.

Recently, we launched April’s Minority Cancer Awareness campaign with the help and support of many fine medical organizations, when I hosted a briefing for legislators at the state Capitol. Dr. Debra Patt, an oncologist and hematologist who serves as chairwoman of the Texas Medical Association Committee on Cancer, related a compelling, real-life story about a patient who needed a double mastectomy but had no insurance and consequently delayed treatment.

Patt told how she had begged and borrowed to get this patient the surgery she needed. The surgery gave the patient a renewed life, only to find that the cancer had metastasized in other parts of her body; most likely, this type of cancer will allow her to live one more year. Patt stated sadly and emphatically that an early diagnosis would have changed her patient’s outcome.

More minority cancer awareness activities are coming this month — TV interviews, public service announcements, and distribution of informational materials. Minority congregations can obtain some free materials about cancer awareness for distribution in worship.

I acknowledge gratefully the help of the American Cancer Society in developing the content of these written materials, and Scott and White Healthcare, Methodist Healthcare Ministries, and Texas Impact for their help with printing and distribution.

I encourage you to help us spread the word in April about Minority Cancer Awareness.

Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon, D-San Antonio, serves on the House Committee on Appropriations and the House Committee on Transportation.

None of those prosecutors has ever been disciplined.

“It paints a bleak picture about what’s going on with accountability and prosecutors,” said Cookie Ridolfi, founder of the Northern California Innocence Project, who researched misconduct data in Texas and other states.

At a symposium today at the University of Texas at Austin, exonerees Michael Morton of Texas and John Thompson of Louisiana, along with lawyers and legal scholars, will discuss the need for increased accountability for prosecutors nationally and in Texas. The symposium is part of a national accountability campaign by the New York-based Innocence Project.

Prosecutorial misconduct has become a national issue in the wake of the high-profile exoneration cases of Thompson and Morton.

Thompson, who was convicted of murder in 1984, was freed from Louisiana’s death row after investigators found biological evidence that proved his innocence. The evidence had been concealed in the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office for 15 years. A jury awarded him $14 million — $1 million for each year he spent in prison. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the award in a 5-4 ruling last year, deciding that the prosecutor was not liable.

Morton served nearly 25 years of a life sentence before DNA results showed last year that he was innocent. His lawyers discovered that Ken Anderson, who oversaw Morton’s case as the Williamson County prosecutor in 1987, did not turn over evidence that could have led to his acquittal.

A rare court of inquiry is scheduled to begin in September and will investigate whether Anderson committed criminal prosecutorial misconduct. Anderson has said that while he regrets that the judicial system made mistakes in Morton’s case, he did nothing wrong.

“There’s no disincentive for a prosecutor to do it unless he or she has an internal moral code themselves,” Ridolfi said. In a study of California cases, her organization reported that from 1997 to 2009, courts found 707 instances of prosecutorial misconduct. There were just six instances in which prosecutors were disciplined.

As more inmates are being freed based on DNA evidence, Ridolfi said, more cases of misconduct are being identified. Although it is often the same prosecutors who repeatedly engage in misconduct, she said, the problem reflects poorly on the entire justice system.

“It’s basically bringing down the integrity of all the district attorneys’ offices,” she said.

In Texas, Ridolfi said, she found only one instance in which a prosecutor was publicly disciplined, and it took place before the time period her group studied. Terry McEachern, who prosecuted the infamous Tulia drug cases in which black defendants were convicted of drug charges concocted by a rogue investigator, received a two-year probated suspension of his law license in 2005 and a $6,225 fine.

Morton and his lawyers have said that they hope his case will prompt lawmakers and the State Bar of Texas to implement policies that hold prosecutors accountable for misconduct.

Rob Kepple, executive director of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, said prosecutors are also discussing the issue of misconduct but have not reached a consensus about the scope of the problem or potential remedies.

State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, said most prosecutors seek to do justice, but that when they make mistakes, there ought to be consequences.

“Society entrusts prosecutors with tremendous power in order to provide justice,” Ellis said in an email. “Yet that tremendous power cannot go unchecked, which is what seems to be the case all too often.”

“Cancer does not discriminate, and is not just a minority problem,” said Lovell Jones, director of the Center for Health Equity and Evaluation Research at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Department of State Health Services Commissioner David Lakey presented statistics showing that cancer mortality rates are not consistent across racial and ethnic groups in Texas. While breast cancer diagnosis is higher among white women, for example, black women have a significantly higher mortality rate.

“If we want to improve health here in Texas,” Lake said, “cancer has to be a priority we work on.”

Oncologist Debra Patt, chairwoman of the Texas Medical Association’s Committee on Cancer, spoke about her experience treating minority cancer patients, and said many of them were either diagnosed or treated in late stages because of their lack of access to comprehensive screenings. In an interview, she spoke about a timely and highly politicized issue — the state’s efforts to remove Planned Parenthood from the Women’s Health Program, a contraception and cancer screening program that does not fund abortions.

“As a poor medical student, I went to Planned Parenthood for routine health screenings, even though I had insurance, because it was all I could afford,” she said.

The afternoon’s speakers talked about the importance of healthy diets and exercise — but keyed in on tobacco use. In past legislative sessions, Texas lawmakers have failed to pass a statewide smoking ban.

“Support a smoke-free Texas,” Patt advised. “It’s low-hanging fruit.”

They also talked budget cuts. The state Office of Minority Health, for example, is operating on a budget that’s $300,000 smaller this biennium than it was last biennium.

The state’s new elections law — which requires groups that register voters to turn in completed forms within 48 hours or risk fines, among other things — has led the state’s League of Women Voters to halt its efforts this year. Rock the Vote, a national organization that encourages young people to vote, began an effort last week to register high school students around the nation — but not in Florida, over fears that teachers could face fines. And on college campuses, the once-ubiquitous folding tables piled high with voter registration forms are now a rarer sight.

Florida, which reminded the nation of the importance of every vote in the disputed presidential election in 2000 when it reported that George W. Bush had won by 537 votes, is now seeing a significant drop-off in new voter registrations. In the months since its new law took effect in May, 81,471 fewer Floridians have registered to vote than during the same period before the 2008 presidential election, according to an analysis of registration data by The New York Times. All told, there are 11.3 million voters registered in the state.

It is difficult to say just how much of the decrease is due to the restrictions in the law, and how much to demographic changes, a lack of enthusiasm about politics or other circumstances, including the fact that there was no competitive Democratic presidential primary this year. But new registrations dropped sharply in some areas where the voting-age population has been growing, the analysis found, including Miami-Dade County, where they fell by 39 percent, and Orange County, where they fell by a little more than a fifth. Some local elections officials said that the lack of registration drives by outside groups has been a factor in the decline.

In Volusia County, where new registrations dropped by nearly a fifth compared with the same period four years ago, the supervisor of elections, Ann McFall, said that she attributed much of the change to the new law. “The drop-off is our League of Women Voters, our five universities in Volusia County, none of which are making a concentrated effort this year,” Ms. McFall said.

Florida’s law — which is being challenged in court by civic groups and, in counties covered by the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department — is one of more than a dozen that states have passed in recent years that have made it harder to vote by requiring voters to show photo identification at polls, reducing early voting periods or making it more difficult to register.

Republicans, who have passed nearly all of the new voting laws, say the restrictions are needed to prevent fraud. Democrats note that such fraud almost never happens, and say that the laws will make it harder for young people and members of minorities, who tend to support Democrats, to vote.

Chris Cate, the communications director for Florida’s Department of State, which oversees the state’s Division of Elections, questioned how much of the decline in registrations should be attributed to the new law, noting that four years ago Floridians were registering to vote in both Democratic and Republican presidential primaries, and gearing up for a constitutional amendment about property taxes, which generated interest and enthusiasm. “To suggest the new elections law had a greater impact on voter registration than the election ballot itself is a leap of logic,” Mr. Cate said.

The law in Florida, which was passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, also reduces the number of early voting days in the state. While the effects of those changes may not be seen until the fall, the new restrictions on voter registrations are already being felt — as Sabu L. Williams, the president of the Okaloosa County Branch of the N.A.A.C.P., discovered this year when he registered some voters during the Martin Luther King’s Birthday weekend.

Mr. Williams’s group registered two voters on the Sunday of the three-day weekend, and noted the time, as required by the law: 2:15 p.m. and 2:20 p.m. When the local elections office reopened on Tuesday, Jan. 17, the group handed the forms in. They were stamped as received at 3:53 p.m.

This resulted in a warning letter from Secretary of State Kurt S. Browning, who noted that the state can levy fines of $50 for each late application, with an annual cap of $1,000 in fines per group. “In your case, although the supervisor’s office was closed on Monday, Jan. 16, the 48-hour period ended for the two applications on Jan. 17 at 2:15 p.m. and 2:20 p.m.; therefore, the applications were untimely under the law,” Mr. Browning wrote. The letter said that “any future violation of the third-party voter registration law may result in my referral of the matter to the attorney general for an enforcement action.”

Mr. Williams said he could not believe it. “We’re out here trying to register voters, and I’m being threatened for doing it because we missed the time limit by around an hour — and we’re doing it on the first business day they were open!” he said. But he vowed to continue registering voters.

Mr. Cate, the spokesman for the Department of State, said the letter was meant to inform Mr. Williams of the law, which he said was a typical response when the state believed that someone had been unaware of the law and violated it unintentionally. Deirdre Macnab, the president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, filed suit with other civic groups to overturn the law. “Basically our volunteers, after 72 years of registering voters problem-free, would now need an attorney on one hand and a secretary on the other to even attempt to navigate these new laws,” said Ms. Macnab, whose organization has sued the state over past restrictions.

Several states place restrictions on groups that register voters. The law in Florida, which is among the strictest in the nation, is similar to one New Mexico passed in 2005, which also imposes penalties for failing to meet a 48-hour deadline for handing in forms. Civic groups challenged the New Mexico law in court and lost. Since the law passed, census data shows, the percentage of New Mexicans who are registered has fallen.

Lee Rowland, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, one of the groups handling the lawsuit for the civic organizations, said they were challenging the Florida law on First Amendment grounds, arguing that speaking to voters and registering them is protected speech. The state took issue with what it called the “pervasive sky-is-falling hyperbole” of the civic groups, and said that the law was intended to make sure voters had their registrations handed in quickly and that outside groups did not overwhelm local elections officials by delivering piles of registration forms all at once.

Last Friday, on the anniversary of the passage of the 26th Amendment, which gave 18-year-olds the right to vote, Rock the Vote opened its national program to educate and register high school students, though not in Florida. “It’s a real shame,” said Heather Smith, the president of Rock the Vote, which joined the lawsuit. “We just cannot put those high school teachers at risk.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 7, 2012

An article on March 28 about voter registration groups that have curbed their efforts in Florida because of a new law that imposes restrictions on them misstated the date that the new law took effect. It was May 2011, not July. (After the bill was signed in May, groups that were already registered with the state were given 90 days to comply with some of its provisions.)

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 29, 2012

A picture caption on Wednesday with the continuation of an article about voter registration groups that have curbed their efforts in Florida because of new restrictions in elections laws there misidentified one of the women shown at a luncheon, second from the right. She is Jean Walker, a board member for the League of Women Voters of Seminole County — not Deirdre Macnab, the president of the League of Women Voters of Florida.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 27, 2012

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a constitutional amendment Florida voters were gearing up for in 2008. The amendment had to do with property taxes and not defining marriage as between a man and a woman.