The state-by-state battle over voter eligibility is not only being fought in the court of public opinion, but in actual courtrooms as well.

Since state rules help determine who ends up getting to vote, it’s possible that new voter identification requirements enacted since the 2008 election could make a difference on Nov. 6 in a few states where there are close presidential, House, and Senate contests.

Even as his department’s lawyers are fighting against Texas and other states in court, Attorney General Eric Holder joined the rhetorical melee last week in a speech to the NAACP by comparing voter ID laws to states’ poll taxes which were banned nearly 50 years ago. Holder said some people "would have to travel great distances” to get state-issued ID cards “and some would struggle to pay for those documents necessary to get them." He said, “We call those poll taxes.”

Poll taxes, which had often been used to deter blacks from voting in Southern states, were outlawed in federal elections by the 24th Amendment to the Constitution in 1964 and in state elections by a Supreme Court decision in 1966.

Holder’s analogy drew a sharp retort from Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who said Holder “once again defamed my state, and our state legislature, by equating our common sense voter I.D. law with a poll tax.  By invoking the specter of Jim Crow racism, the attorney general is playing the lowest form of identity politics.”

Here’s the state of play on the litigation over who gets to vote in some key states:

New Hampshire (4 electoral votes; 2008 winner: Obama with 54 percent)
Last month the Republican-controlled state legislature overrode Democratic Gov. John Lynch’s veto of a voter ID bill. The state is covered by Section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act which requires it to get pre-approval -- called “preclearance” -- from the Justice Department or from the federal court in Washington before implementing any changes in voting procedures. A Justice Department official said DOJ’s determination will be issued on Sept. 5.

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney will be campaigning in the state, which the NBC News Political Unit rates as a toss-up, on Friday.

Wisconsin (10 electoral votes; 2008 winner: Obama with 56 percent)
In two different challenges, two county court judges in Wisconsin have issued injunctions barring enforcement of the voter ID law which Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed last year.

One of those injunctions was issued Tuesday by Dane County Judge David Flanagan, who last year signed the petition to get Walker recalled from office. The recall effort failed on June 5 when Walker won with 53 percent of the vote.

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, a Republican, announced Wednesday that the state is appealing Flanagan’s decision. The NBC News Political Unit rates the state a toss-up.

Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes; 2008 winner: Obama with 54 percent)
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and other groups have sued to block enforcement of the voter ID law signed by Republican Gov. Tom Corbett in March.

A trial will begin in state court next Wednesday in Harrisburg, Pa., -before Judge Robert Simpson.

An assessment by Pennsylvania Secretary of State Carol Aichele’s office found that 91 percent of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters have Pennsylvania Department of Transportation issued licenses which are acceptable ID for voting.

It also reported that names of nearly 760,000 voters couldn’t be matched between the state’s voter list and the driver’s license database. Aichele spokesman Nick Winkler said this number included some simple name mismatches between one database and another – “Dave Smith” versus  “David B. Smith” for example – and that some of the 760,000 do in fact possess valid IDs for voting.

The law also says other forms of ID are acceptable, such as military ID cards, U.S. passports, identification cards from accredited Pennsylvania colleges or universities, Pennsylvania senior care facility IDs, or other photo identification cards issued by the federal, Pennsylvania, county or municipal governments.

Someone without any of those forms of ID can go to one of the more than 70 state Department of Transportation offices and get a state-issued ID.

But David Gersch, an attorney with Arnold & Porter in Washington who is one of the lawyers seeking to have the law blocked, said the state “just doesn’t have the wherewithal to issue that many IDs. It’s just not going to get done” before Election Day.

Gersch said Judge Simpson’s ruling will probably be issued within ten days of the trial’s ending.

The NBC News Political Unit rates Pennsylvania “lean Democratic.”

Florida (29 electoral votes, 2008 winner: Obama with 51 percent)
In the toss-up state of Florida -- where President Barack Obama is campaigning Thursday -- the controversy isn't over voter identification, but over an effort by Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Secretary of State Ken Detzner to have people ineligible to vote removed from the voter rolls.

The Justice Department sued Detzner over this effort, contending that the 1993 National Voter Registration Act doesn't allow states, within 90 days of an election, to conduct a systematic program to remove ineligible people from its voter lists. (Florida’s primary is on August 14.)

Last month, federal district court Judge Robert Hinkle ruled that the way the state first went about its eligibility checking was flawed and “was likely to have a discriminatory impact” on newly naturalized citizens. (About 87,000 Florida residents became naturalized citizens in 2011.)

But Hinkle also said the initial state effort did find a small number of non-citizens who were registered to vote and the evidence “suggests that some actually voted in the past.”

He ruled that a state “can remove an improperly registered noncitizen” from the list of eligible voters, even during the 90-day window prior to an election. 

The Department of Homeland Security had refused Florida’s request to cross-check names of people suspected of being ineligible to vote with a federal databases of non-citizens. After Hinkle’s ruling, DHS reversed itself and allowed Florida to use the database.

Five counties in Florida are covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The American Civil Liberties Union and a Latino voter mobilization group called the Mi Familia Vota Education Fund filed suit last month to try to stop the Florida voter eligibility effort, contending that the state had failed to get section 5 permission from the Justice Department or from a federal court.

Virginia (13 electoral votes; 2008 winner: Obama with 53 percent)
In Virginia -- yet another state rated a toss-up by NBC News -- Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell signed a law allowing voters who show up at the polling place on Election Day without an acceptable form of ID to cast a provisional ballot and then present an approved ID up until the Friday after the election in order to have their vote counted.

He also directed the State Board of Elections to send every voter in the state a voter card before Election Day so that every registered voter has a valid ID to present at the polls.

Virginia law doesn’t require photo identification to vote. In the state, acceptable forms of voter ID include a Virginia driver’s license, a valid student identification card issued by a Virginia college or university, a copy of a current utility bill, or a paycheck that shows the name and address of the voter.

The Justice Department will issue its determination of whether the new Virginia law complies with section 5 of the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 20.

Texas (38 electoral votes; 2008 winner: McCain with 55 percent)
Like Virginia and Florida, Texas is one of the states covered by section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Last week testimony ended in federal district court in Washington in Texas’s suit against Holder, as the state tries to get the court to approve the voter identification law which was enacted last year.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office said the Justice Department had “relied on flawed data, inaccurate information and unreliable expert conclusions” to support Holder's decision to block the Texas law.

According to one of the attorneys representing clients who seek to overturn the law, J. Gerald Hebert of the Campaign Legal Center, the three-judge panel indicated it will issue a ruling next month.  

Hebert contends that the Texas law is “a solution in search of a problem” and that the state legislature’s motivation in passing it was to suppress voting by Latinos and African-Americans.  

Lauren Bean, a spokeswoman for Abbott, said if the federal court denies preclearance, the state will appeal. The NBC News Political Unit rates Texas as “likely Republican.”

At the White House Monday President Barack Obama repeated his call for continuing the current tax rates for single people with income under $200,000 and married couples with incomes under $250,000, and for increasing tax rates on people above those thresholds.

Since the 2008 campaign Obama has been part of the prolonged debate over whether income tax policy ought to be rewound back to the Clinton Era. The current income tax rates have been in effect for nearly ten years and the House will vote in the next few weeks on whether to extend them for one more year. Millions of Americans working today have never known any other income tax rates.  They are set to expire at the end of this year and revert to 2000 levels.

“I’m not proposing anything radical here,” Obama said. Upper-income people should be required to “go back to the income tax rates we were paying under Bill Clinton.”

He added, “Republicans say they don’t want to raise taxes on the middle class; I don’t want to raise taxes on the middle class….Let’s agree to do what we agree on.”

If not “radical,” the president’s proposal Monday was also not new. In fact, he’s made the very same pitch in each of his budget proposals since 2008.

His repetitive stance has put Obama at cross purposes not only with Republicans but with some Democrats, such as Virginia Senate candidate Tim Kaine who wants to raise taxes only on those with incomes over $500,000.

As he did Monday, Obama has a habit of referring to these current tax rates as "tax cuts."

This labeling could make Obama’s audience think that the tax rates which were in effect prior to 2001 were somehow the "normal" or "permanent" income tax rates.  They weren't. Congress had changed the income tax rates five times in the 20 years leading up to 2000, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington.

Although nothing in tax law is truly permanent, if anything in the past few decades has the appearance of permanency, it is the current income tax rates.

But the current rates are simply the ones that Congress and the president have chosen to allow to remain in effect -- or the ones that resulted from standoffs between Obama and congressional Republicans.

Obama himself summed up the history in his budget proposal earlier this year: in December 2010, congressional Republicans insisted on extending the current tax rates through 2012 “and threatened to allow taxes to increase on middle-class families if the Administration did not agree. Not extending the middle-class tax cuts would have hurt our nascent economic recovery, and would have imposed an enormous burden on working families….”

So Obama agreed to extend them to 2012 as part of a deal that also included a payroll tax cut and an extension of unemployment insurance benefits.

Obama said in his February budget proposal that he opposes the extension of the current tax rates on higher-income people and wants the return of the estate tax exemption and rates to 2009 levels. This would reduce the deficit by $968 billion over 10 years, the president’s budget officials estimate.

But what Obama didn’t say in his budget plan is that retaining the current tax rates for people with incomes under $200,000 and $250,000 for couples will come at a huge cost: according to the nonpartisan staff of the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, the Treasury will lose nearly $1.4 trillion in revenue over ten years if those rates remain in effect.

Keeping the child tax credit would add another $267 billion in foregone revenue. This would all add to the future deficits and to government debt that younger Americans will need to pay off when they start working and paying taxes.

All this tax talk may refocus attention on the predicament which Congress and the president continue to find themselves in, pretty much as they did at the end of 2010.

No one disputes the fact that the U.S. economy is weak with 12.7 million people looking for work, 2.5 million needing work but having given up looking, and another 8.2 million working part time because their hours have been cut or because they can’t find a full-time job.

If the economy is this weak, and if there’s the danger a tax increase might, as Obama’s budget plan said “hurt our nascent economic recovery,” then how large a tax increase can the economy tolerate?

And is there a growing potential that “the economy is still too weak” argument will become a more or less permanent rationalization for not increasing tax rates on anyone at all?

To the latter question, the answer in the short term is clearly no: A major tax increase on people with incomes over $200,000 is going to take effect on New Year’s Day, as part of the Affordable Care Act: raising $20 billion in 2013, increasing to nearly $40 billion by 2019.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has called for not only extending the current income tax rates but cutting the top rate from 28 percent to 20 percent, while scrapping certain tax credit and preferences for higher-income people -- although he has not yet revealed which tax breaks he’d get rid of.

Wishing for better times, Democrats frequently invoke the late 1990s as the Golden Era of low unemployment, and budget surpluses. Obama did just that in his White House statement on Monday.

One of the lessons of the late 1990s is that many factors, including economic innovation and the development of new industries, caused higher tax revenues. As the Congressional Budget Office reported in 2000 and as current CBO chief Doug Elmendorf said in a 2001 research paper, this led to an increase in the share of income received by people in the highest tax brackets and a surge in capital gains from the soaring stock market.

The last major piece of tax legislation signed by President Bill Clinton, the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, created the child tax credit, lowered the estate tax, and cut the top capital gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20 percent – in other tax cuts for rich and for people with kids. It did, however, raise taxes on one group: cigarette smokers.

Former president Bill Clinton roiled the presidential campaign Tuesday with comments in an interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo in which he called for continuing all the current income tax rates into early 2013, as opposed to President Obama who wants income tax rates on higher-income people to go up at the start of 2013. Clinton also said the economy is still in a recession.

It was the second time in a week that Clinton had appeared to go “off message” from the Obama campaign and to put distance between himself and the president. In comments on CNN last week, Clinton defended GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney’s role as head of Bain Capital, praising Romney as a man who “had a sterling business career.”

But Clinton said in another interview Tuesday with NBC's Brian Williams that “I’m trying to help the president win re-election because I think he’s done a better job than most people know. I think the health care bill is a step in the right direction... I think his economic policy is dramatically better than the one articulated by Gov. Romney and his supporters."

Clinton also told Williams that he was "aghast" at the media reaction to his comments about Romney.

But Republicans were quick to seize on the apparent divide between Clinton and Obama, citing Clinton’s comments in his interview with CNBC as evidence that Obama is out of step on the tax question and that even the Democratic Party’s elder statesman thinks the economy is in dismal shape.

“I don't have any problem with extending all of it now, including the current spending level,” Clinton said in his interview with Bartiromo. “They're still pretty low, the government spending levels. But I think they look high because there's a recession. So the taxes look lower than they really would be if we had two and a half, three percent growth. And the spending is higher than it would be if we had two and a half, three percent growth because there are so many people getting food stamps, so many people getting unemployment, so many people are Medicaid.”

Within a few hours of Clinton’s frankly downbeat assessment airing on CNBC, Clinton’s spokesman Matt McKenna felt compelled to issue a statement seeking clarify or perhaps revise the former president’s remarks: “Two questions have been raised regarding President Clinton's interview on CNBC today. First, on extending the Bush tax cuts, as President Clinton has said many times before, he supported extending all of the cuts in 2010 as part of the budget agreement, but does not believe the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans should be extended again. In the interview, he simply said that he doubted that a long-term agreement on spending cuts and revenues would be reached until after the election.”

And McKenna explained further that Clinton’s comments on the economy simply stressed the need "to keep the expansion going."

McKenna said that Clinton had said federal revenues were lower than they would normally be “because there was a recession and we're still living with the aftermath of it” – not that America is now in a recession.

Clinton did say in his comments to Bartiromo that “the real issue is not whether they (the current income tax rates) should be extended for another few months. The real issue is whether the price the Republican House will put on that extension is the permanent extension of the tax cuts, which I think is an error.”

Clinton also said that Obama is correct in not wanting to make any commitments in his negotiating with congressional Republicans on tax policy “that will constrain our ability to have long-term debt reduction plan” because by 2014 or 2017 “when the economy grows,” interest rates will “go through the roof.”

It was noteworthy that Clinton did not seem to foresee the economy growing until 2014 at the earliest.