Supreme Court Rules Against Ohio GOP

It's open season in the Buckeye State when it comes to voter fraud:

The Supreme Court is siding with Ohio's top elections official in a dispute with the state Republican Party over voter registrations.
The justices on Friday overruled a federal appeals court that had ordered Ohio's top elections official to do more to help counties verify voter eligibility.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, faced a deadline of Friday to set up a system to provide local officials with names of newly registered voters whose driver's license numbers or Social Security numbers on voter registration forms don't match records in other government databases.

Ohio Republicans contended the information for counties would help prevent fraud. Brunner said the GOP is trying to disenfranchise voters.

Stevens was smart and presented this to the full court rather than trying to runwith the ball himself. Essentially, their decision did not rule on merits but was based on the legal technicality that the Ohio GOP lacks standing (the right to sue)in this particular instance and so was not likely to prevail in a suit to enforce the temporary restraining order given to Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals:

The state GOP had complained that the Ohio Secretary of State had violated her duty, under federal election procedures law, to share with county election boards the lists of voters whose names in a voter registration database do not match data in the state’s drivers’ license files. The GOP argued that the secretary of state had put a stop to required efforts to pass along the non-matching data so that local election officials could deal with it. Lack of matches could be the basis for challenges.

The Supreme Court said it was not expressing any opinion on whether the state official had violated any duty under federal law. But, it said, it was not persuaded that the federal law gives a private party — like the state GOP — a right to go to court to enforce those provisions in the Help America Vote Act. (...)

The Supreme Court, acting on the case after the Circuit Justice, Justice John Paul Stevens referred the matter to the full bench, not only granted the secretary of state’s plea to stay the federal judge’s temporary restraining order, but actually vacated it, thus removing any legal obligation spelled out in that order.

Which means Brunner and ACORN have essentially gotten away with this one, and she has no obligation to inform the County voting boards of `discrepancies' in the bogus registrations. As I said before, the Justice department could investigate this after the fact,but the odds on that if Obama wins and appoints his choice for Attorney General are nonexistant.