Purging Ohio

Test Ticker

Please support Mother Jones with a year-end donation. The truth is, we're a long way from our $600,000 goal, and we have to get as close as we can by Tuesday so we don't have to make hard decisions come January. If you value our reporting, please consider pitching in today.

$600,000

We still need to raise 400,000: Whether you can give $5 or $500, it all matters.

Please support Mother Jones with a year-end donation. We need to raise $600,000, or get as close as we can, by Tuesday so we don't need to make hard decisions come January. Whether you can give $5 or $500, it all makes a difference.

Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters.

PURGING OHIO….A couple of weeks ago the Ohio Republican Party sued the Ohio Secretary of State. Their aim: forcing her to turn over to county officials the raw results of database matching operations for new voter registrations. She had refused because these matching efforts are notoriously unreliable, effectively purging tens of thousands of new registrations because of inaccuracies in the DMV and Social Security databases.

But of course the bulk of new registrations this year are Democratic voters, so the Ohio GOP went to court anyway. Today, in an impressively quick ruling, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against them. I guess Scalia and Thomas must still be feeling guilty over 2000.

UPDATE: Elsewhere, Matt Yglesias makes the case for a national ID card as a way of cutting voter fraud. He doesn’t actually say that, mind you, but that’s how I choose to intepret his tale of voting woe anyway. And I agree.