"A SOLUTION IN SEARCH OF A PROBLEM."

"A SOLUTION IN SEARCH OF A PROBLEM." A terrific article by Garrett Epps puts Karl Rove's pressuring of U.S. Attorneys to pursue bogus "vote fraud" cases into the larger (and highly consequential) context of the GOP's vote fraud fraud. Epps also draws our attention to the Supreme Court's endorsement of the GOP's myths in a little-noticed opinion from 2006:

We can't count on the U.S. Constitution to protect the election process. The Constitution does not explicitly protect the right to vote, and the conservative majority on the Rehnquist and Roberts courts has proved friendly to anti-turnout measures. As Mark Graber of the University of Maryland pointed out recently, the court echoed right-wing rhetoric about voter fraud in a little-noticed 2006 opinion allowing Arizona to implement its restrictive voter-ID law. "Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised," the court's per curiam opinion stated. This is the argument that voter-restrictionists have fallen back on. There may be no voter fraud, but if people think there is, then we should tighten up anyway. That's the argument used in Missouri (with support from the White House), where studies showed elections were mostly clean. As Graber noted, to restrictionists, "such a 'feeling' offsets the interests of voters who are disenfranchised by voter-ID laws by actually driving honest citizens out of the democratic process!"

One is reminded of Bush v. Gore, in which the Court (as Ginsburg initially pointed out, although Scalia bullied her into removing the footnote) held that the fact that some people would have their votes "diluted" by other votes being counted was more important than the actual disenfranchisement of poor and African-American voters throughout the process (including by inferior vote-counting equipment that would be unconstitutional if Bush v. Gore was actually constitutional law.) So while, as Epps notes, the Missouri State Supreme Court prevented an atrocious voter-ID law that would have maintained Republican control of the Senate from being enforced in the 2006 elections, we should never forget that illegal disenfranchisement by the GOP put Bush in the White House. That Republicans have managed to conceal this while creating a mythical crisis of "vote fraud" is a remarkable and appalling achievement in Orwellian discourse.

--Scott Lemieux