Working without a net

Whether or not a pending case is heard immediately by the Wisconsin Supreme Court is up to four Justices—a simple majority—to decide.

Evidently there are not four Justices willing to take up the question of whether Wisconsin’s Voter ID law, bogged down in the appellate court system is constitutional.

Unless that changes very soon—and we see little prospect that it will—the battleground state of Wisconsin will conduct its November election without a safety net; that is, with no assurance that voters registering at the polls on election day aren’t stealing someone else’s vote, casting multiple ballots, or using fictitious identities to record votes from nonexistent people.

It’s not as if we’ve never run this risk before. It’s just that we’ve never before done it in an election that could directly determine whether we ward off national bankruptcy or dive headlong into it. A story this past Sunday described the current state of play.

Notice how opponents of voter ID always insist there’s no such thing as fraud? And remember the dozen or so people who have been imprisoned over the past couple of years for voter fraud in Wisconsin, some of them involved in systematically manufacturing hundreds of false voter registrations?

Speaking of systematic, consider the Obama administration’s cynical effort to portray ballot security as a civil rights violation. Make no mistake, the defenders of vote fraud are organized and strategically placed in government. Without help from the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the only defense for honest voters is to turn out—and bring trusted friends along—in record numbers.