My new Slate piece begins:
One part of the story of the 2012 voting wars is well known: Republican legislatures have passed a series of laws making it at least modestly harder for people to vote. These GOP-inspired rules have included limits on early voting, stricter rules for voter registration, and new voter ID laws to stamp out unproven allegations of voter fraud. Less well-known is that courts have reined in some of these excesses, including a decision to block Texas’s stringent voter ID law, an injunction putting Pennsylvania’s voter ID law on hold for this election, and a settlement blocking the worst of Florida’s voter registration hurdles.
The judicial record has been decidedly mixed. The Pennsylvania law will likely be approved by the 2014 elections, courts have allowed Republican secretaries of state to pursue purges of noncitizens from voting rolls despite ample evidence that the lists erroneously included many eligible voters, and federal courts recently refused to roll back Texas’ tough new voter registration rules.
But the fight over Ohio’s election laws tells a different story. The Buckeye State has seen a rather remarkable string of wins for voting rights supporters. Federal courts have ordered the expansion of early voting and saved the votes of potentially thousands of voters who would have been disenfranchised because of poll worker errors, such as sending a voter to the wrong table to vote because the worker cannot tell an odd from an even number. Even more remarkably, the decisions from Democratic and Republican judges alike have relied on a very broad reading of Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that ended the 2000 Florida recount in favor of George W. Bush. In fact, if President Obama narrowly ekes out a win in Ohio, he might have the conservative Supreme Court justices from 2000—Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Justices Scalia and Thomas—to thank for the victory.