Ohio catastrophe averted

This morning the Supreme Court overturned a decision by an Ohio court that would have required the election department in Ohio to begin a massive program to provide local voting officials with information about voters whose information in their database doesn't match information in other state databases. To accomplish this would have been a massive undertaking- restructuring the state's voter database system- while early voting was already going on.

The initial decision had come in a case where the Ohio Republica Party had brought suit against the Secretary of State, and SCOTUS today ruled that the ORP had no standing to sue, which is consistent with all other interpretations of the Help America Vote Act ("HAVA"), under which the suit was brought, which have found that HAVA creates no right in individuals or political parties to sue. To have ruled otherwise would have allowed any political party to seek temporary restraining orders against elections officials, setting the stage for significant voter-suppression activities as folks tried to gum up election departments on the eve (or apparently even during) elections.

Text of the SCOTUS decision is here.