…to assure the survival and success of the Republican Party.
The Ohio Secretary of State, Jon Husted, has been slapped down by a federal judge for unconstitutionally trying to deprive people of their right to vote, but he is undeterred:
Husted fired back, saying through a spokesman late Tuesday that the judge’s ruling would allow potentially fraudulent votes to be counted. Husted will appeal the ruling. (Emphasis added)
(via cleveland.com)
It’s simple really. Better that thousands of valid votes be rejected than that one fraudulent vote be counted. It’s the same noble sentiment expressed by Bismarck that “it is better that ten innocent men suffer than one guilty man escape”.
Take a gander, by the way, at the judge’s decision, which is reproduced in full at the link above. He makes good and creative use of Bush v. Gore. The court, as I recall, practically directed the lower courts not to use the case as precedent, because (and I’m injecting my reading here, the court did not admit this) it opened an equal protection loophole that might actually be turned against the interests of the right. Well, that’s what the court did in this case, basically ruling that the Secretary of State violated equal protection, citing Bush v. Gore, by threatening to apply different standards to different groups of voters. Exactly the sort of thing the Supreme Court wanted to leave in place if they could, for their sole objective was to find a rationale, however legally absurd, for installing Bush in office. The equal protection argument actually makes sense in the Ohio case, but it’s richly ironic that the judge is able to make it by citing to a case in which the court ruled as it did in order to keep votes from being counted.
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