Hot Potato

by digby

The Supremes wisely (and unanimously) refused to get burned by Republican election fraud shennanigans before the election. (No guarantees about after…)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in favor of Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, overturning a lower-court order that she provide to county elections boards by today details of discrepancies discovered with new voter registrations. The court ruled 9-0 that the Ohio Republican Party, which sued Brunner for the information, was unlikely to succeed in its arguments that Brunner legally could be sued on this issue and that the courts had the authority to issue the order. But the court expressed no opinion about whether federal law was being followed properly. At issue is what should be done when personal information from newly registered voters doesn’t match state motor vehicle and federal Social Security records after an automatic computer check is done. The ruling settles for now a dispute that had worked its way through the lower federal courts in recent days, with district and appellate judges taking different sides on the issue.

I love the theory of this conspiracy. People are registering voters with names, addresses, ages, drivers’ license numbers or last four digits of their Social Security numbers, which are very close to real voter’s information. (So close they appear to be data entry typos.) And then these 200,000 fraudulent voters, all of whom are in on the secret plan, vote under their own names and later come back and vote again under the closely matched phony information. (Either that or they all have an elaborate second identity which includes phony ID and social security numbers.)

If the Democrats can pull this off, I think it’s clear they should win the election just for their supernatural ability to get hundreds of thousands of people to keep such a secret.