Bush v. Gore continues

The anti-democratic fallout from the preposterous decision grows even more evident, and if this doesn't tell you all you need to know about the Roberts court, then I don't know what will.

Under the Indiana law, voters who are turned away for lack of identification may cast provisional ballots, which are counted only if the voter travels to the county clerk’s office within 10 days to show the required identification or sign a sworn statement that he cannot afford to obtain such an identification. The plaintiffs have argued that this extra step and required travel create an unnecessary burden that other states with identification requirements do not impose; those states do not require voters to make a second trip in order to have a provisional counted.

Chief Justice Roberts, who grew up in Indiana, did not seem to find the burden excessive. “County seats aren’t very far for people in Indiana,” he said.

Mr. Smith replied that the county seat in Lake County was a 17-mile bus ride from the county’s urban center of Gary. “If you’re indigent, that’s a significant burden,” he said. The chief justice also seemed unimpressed by the absence of known voter impersonators. “It’s a type of fraud that, because it’s fraud, it’s hard to detect,” he said to Mr. Smith.

Dahlia Lithwick has more.

To recap: I fear I am counting five justices who believe that a nonexistent problem can be constitutionally cured by burdening the fundamental right to vote. Happy byproduct? Doing away with those pesky facial challenges that liberals like to use to address massive injustices. So in the guise of doing away with hypothetical future challenges to a law, the court is poised to uphold a law that solves hypothetical future problems in voting. And for those of you wondering why the court didn't see fit to release audio for today's monumentally important argument, the answer remains, who knows? But here's one guess: The justices didn't want to be caught on tape sounding like the same 5-4 court that decided Bush v. Gore, even if nothing has changed.