One case decided, another possibly appealed; one addresses voting rights, and the other campaign finance regulation.  Both were in the news yesterday, and they made for dreary reading.

     Voting Rights.  In a lengthy, dryly written opinion (part 1 and part 2), a trial court upheld the Georgia voter ID law.  The Court found that the plaintiffs lacked standing and, for good measure, that their case lacked merit.  On the merits, the Court applauded the state for educational and other efforts in helping voters acquire the necessary identification.  It concluded that state could rationally pick out impersonation fraud as a problem, without evidence that it exists or much interest one way or the other in the evidentiary question.  The state’s interest here is much fortified, as the Court reads it, by Purcell v. Gonzalez’ speculative assertions about the lawful voters who might give up on the system and surrender their votes for fear that their voice is nullified by fraud. 

     So the Court concludes that voters with the least resources and flexibility must bear up as well as they can:  if they must bring their children with them on a mission to obtain an ID, then so be it.  They can walk the quarter mile, or hitch a ride with friends or family, and in a pinch, they can vote absentee.

     It all sounds reasonable enough: and by the court’s choice of test, the state need only have its reasons, reasonably enough explained.  Except that rationality here includes putting all these voters to much trouble, and rationalizing the cost to them, without a demonstrated need for all the burdens.  In short, the state need not be put to too much trouble in justifying its actions: the standards by which its treatment of its citizens are judged are far more lenient than those to which the citizens themselves, as voters, are held.  And this is before we get to the suspicious selectivity of voting codes that pass on the evident fraud possible through absentee voting and devote their regulatory attention only to the slight threat of impersonation fraud.

     Campaign Finance.  The Complainant Bambenek, having failed to slay the mighty Kos on the fields of the FEC, is considering taking the battle upstream, on appeal.  He will lose there, too, if he goes ahead with the plan.

     Mr. Bambenek’s problem is not one he can easily recover from: he seems unable to appreciate his legal position, and his obstinacy is such that, reviewing the FEC’s judgment—one rendered lickety-split, by an agency fully bipartisan in its rejection of his complaint—he has convinced himself that the regulators just misread the law while he got it right.  Perhaps, losing in the next round, he will convince himself that he won, and it will end.

There once was a complainant named  Bambenek:
Setting sail against Kos, all (two) hands on deck:
Though his ship’s run aground,
He thinks his course is quite sound,
Seeing not that he’s stuck in the sand—a wreck.  

 

Bob Bauer