Mozambique: Opposition Renamo rejects election results | AFP

Mozambique’s main opposition party Renamo on Thursday claimed victory in the country’s election, rejecting official tallies that appeared to show the ruling Frelimo party on course for a landslide victory. “We are not accepting the results of these elections,” party spokesman Antonio Muchanga said — a move that raises the spectre of post-election violence. “We can categorically say Renamo won these elections,” Muchanga told a news conference. With nearly a quarter of the polling stations reporting on Wednesday’s vote, Frelimo candidate Filipe Nyusi looked set to become the country’s new president, having garnered 63 percent of the vote. Initial tallies showed Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama struggling to win 30 percent of the vote. But amid allegations of ballot tampering and election violence, Renamo — which fought a long civil war against formerly Marxist Frelimo — said the vote should be annulled.

Voting Blogs: Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law goes through the wringer | State of Elections

Like many other states, Wisconsin has recently enacted a voter ID law. After winning both the state legislature and the governor’s office in 2010 (a wave year for Republicans), the Wisconsin GOP quickly acted to restrict voting. Governor Scott Walker quickly signed the bill, claiming it was about the integrity of our electoral process, saying “to me, something as important as a vote is important … whether its one case, 100 cases  or 100,000 cases.” Voting rights groups, on the other hand, pointed out that in-person voter fraud (what the law claims to address) is exceedingly rare. They claimed that the real purpose of the law was to discourage voting among constituencies which tend to vote Democratic. ACLU Voting Rights Project Director Dale Ho has been at the forefront of the fight against Wisconsin’s law. Ho said that 300,00 or more Wisconsin voters lack the required ID, and that to allow them all to vote 6,000 IDs would have to be issued every day, a practical impossibility. The Advancement Project agreed that getting all the required IDs out would be “mathematically impossible.” While many states are in the midst of litigation over voter ID issues, the Wisconsin case is especially pertinent, since it involves a hotly contested gubernatorial race and could the ID rules in place could sway the election.

Mozambique: Polls close with opposition crying foul | AFP

Mozambicans voted Wednesday in a closely-fought test for the ruling Frelimo party, which has run the southern African country since independence from Portugal in 1975, with opposition parties crying foul. Frelimo is facing growing discontent over a wealth gap that persists despite huge mineral resources, with fast economic growth sidestepping the bulk of a population that is among the world’s poorest. But members of the two opposition parties later claimed they had discovered attempts to stuff ballots by the ruling party. “A young man was shot (in the feet). He tried to stop the Frelimo (local) secretary from stuffing boxes,” in central Sofala province, said Sandes Carmona, spokesman for the fledgling MDM opposition party.  In northern Nampula province, riot police used teargas to disperse a crowd that had gathered at a polling station to watch the counting, claimed the MDM representative in the area, Elias Nquiri. Main opposition Renamo spokesman, Adriano Muchunga, claimed police opened fire in Nampula, the largest electoral province.

Arizona: Maricopa County elections officials dealing with 2nd ballot blunder | KPHO

For the second time this election season Maricopa County could be dealing with a ballot blunder. Monday night on CBS 5 News at 10 we told you about a voter who received two ballots in the mail. Now, voters are getting ballots with the wrong names on them. Early voters need to pay close attention to two areas on the front of their ballot envelope and make sure the two addresses match. In some cases they don’t. George Irrgang had already sealed his early ballot and was prepared to mail it back until we suggested he double check that ballot was in fact his. “I looked at it pretty carefully I thought,” Irrgang said. However, even though the ballot was addressed to him it actually belongs to someone else. “Yea, someone named Gwendolyn,” Irrgang added. After our story about two ballots delivered to a voter, more viewers hit our action button, alerting us to their own erroneous ballots.

California: Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters Admits More Mistakes for Mail-in Ballots | San Jose Inside

Just weeks after the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters re-printed a slew of sample ballots missing entire races and candidate info, the agency has to deal with another batch of faulty election literature. Earlier this month, the county had to re-print and re-mail 100,000 sample ballots because of entire sections missing candidates from the Gavilan Joint Community College District and Santa Clara Unified School District races. The county corrected the slip-up and alerted voters by snail mail, email and phone calls. But the printing company for absentee ballots used proofs from those older samples, running off 1,007 mail-in ballots missing the same information. Voters have already received those faulty ballots.

Editorials: End Exemptions To Connecticut’s Post-Election Audits | Luther Weeks/CT News Junkie

When auditing town expense accounts, would it make sense to exempt some departments? When inspecting trucks, would it make sense to exempt school buses? When inspecting restaurants, would it make sense to exempt diners? Any exemption is an opening for errors to go undetected and an opportunity for fraud. Equally it doesn’t make sense that the Connecticut’s post-election audit law exempts all votes on questions, election day registration, originally hand-counted ballots and absentee ballots from our post-election audit.  Election integrity and public confidence demand that all ballots be subject to random selection for audit. Exempt ballots already determine many elections, while the number and percentage of exempt ballots is growing. Currently about 9 percent of ballots are absentee ballots, many elections and primaries are decided by much lower margins than 9 percent. If the State enacts early voting, following other states those numbers will almost certainly rise to over 30 percent within a few years. Compare that to the race for governor in 2010, which was officially decided by about 0.6 percent—more than triple the 2000 vote margin necessary for a recanvass. Since Connecticut recently initiated Election Day registration, we can anticipate those votes to reach 10 percent of votes in a few years, which will further add to the totals exempt from the audit.

District of Columbia: Election officials say they’ve addressed delays | The Washington Post

Elections officials in the nation’s capital say they’ve addressed computer glitches that led to major delays in counting votes during the April 1 primary, but critics say the process of identifying and fixing the problem was slow and insufficiently transparent. The vote totals will be closely watched in November, with the District of Columbia on track for its most competitive general election for mayor in 20 years. In April, it took nearly four hours after polls closed for results sufficient to call the winner to be made available. D.C. Councilmember Muriel Bowser defeated scandal-plagued Mayor Vincent Gray in the Democratic primary, making her the favorite to win the general election in the overwhelmingly Democratic city. According to the D.C. Board of Elections, a widespread network connectivity error led to the delays in counting votes. It’s since been repaired, the board said last month. That was different from the explanation the elections board offered on the chaotic primary night, when it blamed a handful of malfunctioning electronic machines.

Kentucky: Conway tries to preserve Kentucky electioneering law | Courier-Journal

Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway turned to a federal appeals court Wednesday in his effort to preserve a state law that bans electioneering close to polling places, calling the buffer zone an important safeguard against Election Day shenanigans. With the general election less than three weeks away, Conway moved quickly with his motion to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in an effort to keep the law in place — pending an appeal — to insulate voters from campaign activities outside the polls. The filing came a day after U.S. District Judge William O. Bertelsman ruled that the law’s 300-foot anti-electioneering buffer violates First Amendment speech rights. The judge issued a permanent injunction blocking the law’s enforcement. Conway wants the appeals court to block Bertelsman’s ruling, which caught the attention of local election officials in Kentucky.

Texas: Voter ID case flies up to Supreme Court | McClatchy

The Supreme Court on Wednesday received several last-ditch pleas from opponents of the tough new Texas voter ID law. Acting one day after an appellate court effectively kept the Texas law in place, opponents including the Obama administration filed multiple emergency applications asking the high court to remove the lower court’s stay. “The need to ensure that hundreds of thousands of voters in Texas are able to exercise their right to vote, the need to stamp out intentional racial discrimination, and the need to ensure that elections are administered fairly, efficiently, and equitably, the public interest overwhelmingly favors vacating the stay,” attorneys wrote. The initial emergency application, signed by Houston-based attorney Chad W. Dunn, was submitted to Justice Antonin Scalia, who oversees emergency issues in Texas and other Fifth Circuit states. Scalia has the option of forwarding the application to all nine justices. Scalia gave Texas until 5 p.m. Thursday to respond.

Texas: State stopped issuing voter IDs while pushing to reinstate law | MSNBC

Texas’s strict voter ID law, struck down last week, is now back in place thanks to an appeals court ruling Tuesday. But while the state was pushing to get the law reinstated, it stopped issuing IDs. It said Wednesday morning that it has started again. The on-again-off-again schedule could add to the hurdles and confusion that voters face in obtaining an ID. And it offers a window into the GOP-controlled state’s approach to voting: In a nutshell, critics say, Texas jumped at the chance to stop issuing IDs, even though it was far from clear that a halt was required by law. From the start, voting rights advocates have noted in court and in the media that Texas’s efforts to make the special state IDs it created — known as Election Identification Certificates (EICs) — available to those who need them have been half-hearted at best. Among other things, they’ve charged that the mobile ID offices that the state created for distributing IDs were poorly publicized, and weren’t sent to nearly enough locations. Between June 2012 when the law went back into effect and the end of August, just 279 EICs were issued, the state has said.

Texas: Supreme Court to decide if Texas voter ID law can take effect | Los Angeles Times

The Supreme Court is set to decide whether Texas can enforce its new photo-ID rule in time for this year’s midterm election. The case reached the court Wednesday in an emergency appeal. Critics asked justices to block the rule, arguing it discriminates against minorities. Last week, a federal judge decided that the rule could prevent as many as 600,000 registered voters from casting a ballot and that Texas lawmakers who approved the law intended to make it harder for blacks and Latinos to vote. Texas Atty. Gen. Greg Abbott, who is running for governor, quickly appealed. On Tuesday, the 5th Circuit Court in New Orleans lifted the judge’s order and said the photo-ID law can be enforced in this year’s election for the first time. It “is virtually unheard of,” civil rights advocates complained, to permit a state to enforce a new election law “in a case where purposeful racial discrimination has been found in a final judgment after a full trial.”

Brazil: Presidential race heading for October 26 photo finish | Reuters

Brazil’s most unpredictable presidential election in a generation is heading toward a photo finish on Oct. 26 between leftist incumbent Dilma Rousseff and pro-business challenger Aecio Neves, a new poll showed on Wednesday. In an increasingly acrimonious campaign, the candidates traded accusations of lies, corruption and nepotism in a bruising television debate on Tuesday night that had no clear winner and saw more attacks than discussion of policy issues. Neves, the market favorite, has gained ground since his stronger-than-expected showing in the first-round vote on Oct. 5, when he bested environmentalist Marina Silva to place second behind Rousseff. But Neves has struggled to build on that momentum and has been running neck-and-neck with Rousseff in opinion polls for the last week.

Canada: Advance poll turnout in Toronto sets a first-day record | Toronto Star

Toronto voters flocked to advance polls Tuesday to record the highest-ever first day turnout, the city says. “I think we can say this is a municipal election campaign that has caught the attention of Torontonians and they want their voice to be heard,” said Ryerson University politics professor Myer Siemiatycki. The city said the tally far surpasses the 16,000 votes cast during the six weekdays of advance voting in the 2010 election. That year, some 77,000 votes in total were cast in advance. So just the first day of 2014 advance voting represents about 37 per cent of the 2010 total, with five days left to vote early, through Oct. 19. (Election day is Oct. 27.) On day one of voting in 2010 the total was just 2,690 — although direct comparisons may be somewhat misleading because the advance poll was held at only six locations that year, compared with 45 this year: one in each ward and one at city hall.

United Kingdom: Government pours cold water on e-voting | UKA

A switch to electronic voting has been ruled out by the government – just weeks after a Labour Party report said it backed the shake-up. Sam Gyimah, the constitution minister, told MPs that such a voting revolution was unwise because there was no way to “check an error”. …  At its autumn conference, Labour pointed to electronic voting as part of a package of reforms that could build on the excitement and record turnout at the Scottish referendum. Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary, said: “Holding elections at weekends to raise turnout. Polling opened a week in advance to allow early voting. Electronic voting, making sure it’s affordable and isn’t open to abuse.”

National: What the voter ID court battles could mean for Election Day | CBS

With three weeks left before Election Day, officials and voting rights advocates in Texas are still wrangling in court over the state’s controversial and restrictive new voting law. Any day now, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to say whether the Texas voter ID law should be implemented on Election Day or not. The Supreme Court could step in as well. Should the appeals court — and possibly the Supreme Court — side with the law’s supporters, the law will be reinstated before the midterms, keeping more than 608,000 registered voters that don’t have the required ID from voting. If the courts side with opponents of the voter ID law and put it on hold for the time being, the law’s supporters argue it would inject “doubt where for 15 months, and three statewide elections, there had been certainty.” The Texas case is just one of several ongoing disputes over controversial voting laws that could have an impact at polling places on Nov. 4.

National: Whites are more supportive of voter ID laws when shown photos of black people voting | The Washington Post

Sixty-seven percent of white Americans support voter ID laws, according to a new University of Delaware study of 1,436 U.S. adults. But when the voter ID question was accompanied by a photo of black people using a voting machine, white support for voter ID laws jumped to 73 percent. That six-percentage-point difference is modest but statistically significant. The images made no difference to black and hispanic voters’ preferences, although the authors note the sample sizes for those groups were considerably stronger. Among white voters, “the resulting increase in support for the laws happens independently of — even after controlling for— political ideology and negative attitudes about African Americans,” researcher David C. Wilson said in a release about the study. Many white Americans think racism is basically over, and some believe that racism against whites is actually a bigger problem than racism against blacks. But results like these show that racism is still very much active at the subconscious level.

National: Federal Election Commission Rulemakings Roil Agency, Critics | Roll Call

Is the Federal Election Commission a dysfunctional agency deaf to voters fed up with loophole-riddled campaign finance rules? Or is it a newly revived organization making unprecedented moves to invite a wide-ranging public debate over its regulations? The answer may be both. In a fit of productivity on Oct. 9, the FEC managed to outrage its critics, thrill political party leaders, send election lawyers scrambling and break out once again into public bickering. It was an abrupt departure from the months and even years of partisan deadlock that have rendered the FEC incapable of settling even the most routine enforcement disputes. Advocates of political money restrictions have long decried the FEC’s paralysis, but they are even more irate now that the agency has finally sprung into action. Most controversial was the FEC’s move to essentially double the maximum that donors may contribute to the Republican and Democratic National Committees. The Campaign Legal Center’s Larry Noble called it a “disgraceful and activist decision” at odds with federal law.

Editorials: Voter ID Math Finally Adds Up for Judge Posner | Noah Feldman/Bloomberg

Liberal observers are astonished and thrilled that Judge Richard Posner, the most influential judge sitting on the federal bench, has written a scathing condemnation of Wisconsin voter ID laws. Posner was appointed by Ronald Reagan, and his law-and-economics approach with its libertarian overtones can in a certain sense be described as conservative. Notably, Posner wrote a 2007 opinion upholding Indiana’s strict voter ID law — an opinion subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court. Now, it would seem from the headlines, Posner has reversed himself. Newsworthy, right? Well, sort of. A close reading of Posner’s opinion indicates that the judge hasn’t so much reversed his earlier view as he has taken seriously data that were unavailable in 2007. The numbers, as Posner now interprets them, do strongly suggest that the purpose of voter ID laws is to make it more difficult for poor people, especially blacks and Latinos, to cast votes. According to Posner, he wasn’t wrong in 2007. It’s just that then, there was no basis to assume that Indiana was trying to exclude minority voters. Now, there’s evidence in favor of that view. A careful look at Posner’s opinion is an object lesson in how a rational person should reconsider initial presumptions in light of new evidence — an approach pioneered by the British statistician Thomas Bayes in the 18th century and now dubbed Bayesianism. When Posner had to analyze the Indiana statute, he made much of the fact that, as he now puts it, “there was no evidence that the Indiana law was likely to disenfranchise more than a handful of voters.”

Editorials: When Duty Doesn’t Call: Voter ID laws bring out the worst in their uncivic-minded opponents | The American Spectator

Americans will cease arguing over the federal Voting Rights Act and its intricacies — oh, I imagine around the time Texas starts exporting ground water to Minnesota, or the Lord returns to judge the quick and the dead. Mandatory voter ID laws passed by Republican legislatures in Texas, Arkansas, and Wisconsin have been under legal assault by Democrats. A lower federal court order expanding statewide early voting and same-day registration in Ohio got overturned by the Supreme Court — which had before it, at the same time, an appeal from North Carolina asking affirmation of its right to eliminate same-day registration and voting, along with out-of-precinct voting. Democrats see in these various state laws an evil Republican attempt to suppress voting by minority group members likely to — duh — vote Democratic. Requirements to present photographic identification draw particular scorn. Republicans say all they want to do is make sure voting procedures are honest and reflective of actual popular will. The point commonly buried in these slanging matches over intent and results is a point little attended to in our current ideological wars. I would call that point the need for rekindled earnestness regarding the duties that come, or ought to, with exercise of the franchise.

Editorials: California politicians would never suppress voting, but they might not count all the ballots | The Sacramento Bee

It’s tempting to be smug in the face of other states’ fights over voter suppression. California, thankfully, isn’t Texas, where voter-ID requirements were compared to a poll tax by a federal judge last week. Signed into law by Gov. Rick Perry in 2011, the ID requirement was just one of many ways in which the Lone Star State historically blocked participation among minority voters, said U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos, who ruled that the requirement had an “impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African Americans, and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose.” And Texas, of course, isn’t the only part of the nation where voter protections aren’t, well, Californian. A year after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision narrowing the Voting Rights Act, 15 states controlled by Republicans have imposed tighter restrictions on voting for the Nov. 4 election, the Los Angeles Times reported last week.

Georgia: Claims of tens of thousands of missing applications prompts a closer look | CBS46

The New Georgia Project claims 47,867 voter registration applications cannot be found across five counties; Fulton, DeKalb, Clayton, Chatham and Muscogee. They claim to have turned in 7,481 applications that cannot be located to DeKalb County. The group says they have checked the voter list and the list of pending applications at the county level to no avail. After a paper application is turned in, the county has to input the applications information to the system. The system will then attempt to verify the information and approve the registration. If approved the voter is added to the voter list. If an application cannot be verified, or if it cannot be input into the system for verification due to an error or missing information, it is placed on the pending list and a letter is supposed to be sent to the applicant at the address on the application.

Kentucky: Judge blocks law banning campaigning near polls | Associated Press

A Kentucky law banning election-day campaigning near polling places was struck down Tuesday by a federal judge, who ruled the 300-foot buffer impedes free speech by reaching private homes and yards. The ruling by U.S. District Judge William O. Bertelsman came three weeks before voters head to the polls to decide a long ballot of local, state and federal races. Those races include the hard-fought U.S. Senate campaign pitting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. The ruling means that a broad range of electioneering activities would be allowed near the polls, said Christopher Wiest, one of the attorneys for the northern Kentucky man who challenged the state law. “What this means is there is now complete freedom of speech in and around polling places on Election Day,” Wiest said by phone. “People can hand out fliers, talk to voters. They can wear (campaign) T-shirts, they can hold signs. All that is now fair game.”

North Carolina: Superior Court judge orders early voting site for ASU campus | News Observer

A Wake County Superior Court judge has sided with a group of Appalachian State University students who were miffed that there wasn’t an early voting site on campus this year. Judge Donald Stephens on Monday kicked Watauga County’s plan back to the State Board of Elections for revision, ordered it to include “at least one” ASU early voting site, and agreed with the plaintiffs that the plan violated a constitutional provision against the discrimination of young voters. “I think it’s a great victory for voting rights,” said Bill Gilkeson, attorney for the seven plaintiffs, five of whom are students. Elections records show Watauga County has the highest percentage of student voters of any county in the state, while the plaintiffs’ petition for judicial review noted students make up 34 percent of the county’s population. “All credible evidence indicates that the sole purpose of that plan was to eliminate an early voting site on campus so as to discourage student voting and, as such, it is unconstitutional,” wrote Stephens in his order.

Texas: Appeals court reinstates voter ID law; foes vow to go to Supreme Court | Star-Telegram

A federal appeals court on Tuesday evening reinstated Texas’ controversial voter identification law, striking down a lower court’s ruling that blocked it on grounds it would have “an impermissible discriminatory effect” on Hispanics and African-Americans and is unconstitutional. The three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed a ruling just five days earlier by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of Corpus Christi on grounds that it “substantially disturbs the election process of the state of Texas just nine days before early voting begins.”

Texas: Appeals court reinstates Texas voter ID law | Associated Press

A federal appeals court on Tuesday reinstated Texas’ tough voter ID law for the November election, which the U.S. Justice Department had condemned as the state’s latest means of suppressing minority voter turnout. The ruling by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocks last week’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos in Corpus Christi, who determined the law unconstitutional and similar to a poll tax designed to dissuade minorities from voting. The 5th Circuit did not rule on the merits of the law; instead, it determined it’s too late to change the rules for the upcoming election. Early voting starts Oct. 20. The law remains under appeal. For now, the ruling is a key victory for Republican-backed photo ID measures that have swept across the U.S. in recent years. The Texas law, considered the toughest of its kind in the nation, requires that an estimated 13.6 million registered Texas voters will need one of seven kinds of photo identification to cast a ballot.

Mozambique: As Mozambique Votes, Economy Dominates Election Issues | VoA News

As Mozambique prepares to vote Wednesday, the nation has clearly progressed beyond its reputation as a war-ravaged southern African nation that struggled for decades to piece itself together.  Today’s Mozambique is full of economic promise, thanks in part to huge natural gas reserves. What makes this particular national election interesting is that the clouds of Mozambique’s 16-year civil war, which ended in 1992, no longer dominate every political discussion.  These days, it’s all about the economy. That is nowhere more evident than in Maputo’s central market, where election posters virtually wallpaper the market.  Many sellers even wear aprons bearing the smiling face of the leading presidential candidate, Filipe Nyusi of the longtime ruling party Frelimo. The party effectively controls the capital.

Mozambique: New actors shake up the coming elections | Deutsche Welle

Mozambique could see a new political landscape after elections on October 15. Next to the old rivals, FRELIMO and RENAMO, a new party, the MDM has gathered political strength. Jose Domingos Manuel, seems certain of a victory. His cap boasts the party logo and his t-shirt an image of the MDM’s top candidate Daviz Simango. The Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM) is only five years old, but it is aiming high. “Simango is the right man to lead this country,” says MDM board member Domingos Manuel. The MDM won a surprise victory in the 2013 local elections. They beat the powerful ruling FRELIMO in four major towns. Domingos Manuel thinks that the party has proven its ability to rule at least at a local level.

Spain: Catalan Leader Plans Revised Independence Vote in November | Wall Street Journal

The leader of the wealthy Catalonia region Tuesday said that he would move forward with a controversial plan to hold a vote on independence in November, but under a revised process that both supporters and opponents say would lend decidedly less legitimacy to the outcome. Catalan leader Artur Mas said he was abandoning his original plan for a nonbinding referendum set for Nov. 9, because he saw no hope of persuading Spain’s constitutional court to lift an injunction barring the vote. In remarks Tuesday in Barcelona, Mr. Mas acknowledged the new voting plan, with volunteer election officials and no voter-roll, wouldn’t be “definitive” and was vague about many of the operational details. The revised plan “is more an act of citizen participation, like a petition drive, rather than a referendum or an election,” said Lluís Orriols, a political scientist at Carlos III University in Madrid.

United Kingdom: Voting age ‘should be extended’, think tank finds | BBC

Voting in all elections should be extended to include 16 and 17-year-olds, following the independence referendum, a study has suggested. The work by think tank dpart found lowering the voting age could increase youngster’s engagement with politics. It also found schools had more influence than parents in giving confidence in understanding politics. Those aged 16 and 17 were able to vote in the referendum on 18 September, the first UK ballot to include them. Researchers at dpart gathered evidence from two surveys of under 18s – one conducted in April and May 2013, and then a second conducted one year later. More than 1,000 young people responded to each survey.

National: A conservative judge’s devastating take on why voter ID laws are evil | Los Angeles Times

In a rational world, the debate over voter ID laws would be ended by the eloquent, incisive and angry opinion issued late last week by U.S. Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner of Chicago in a case concerning Wisconsin. But this isn’t a rational world. So not only will the debate continue, but Posner’s opinion failed even to sway his fellow judges on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court split 5-5 on Posner’s request for an en banc — that is, full court — rehearing of the Wisconsin case, in which a three-judge panel already had cleared the state’s ID law to go into effect for next month’s election. That meant Posner’s request was turned down and his opinion was in the nature of a dissent. As it happens, the Supreme Court has stepped in and suspended the Wisconsin law, probably invalidating it for the upcoming polls. But Posner’s 30-page dissent, laid out in his typical lucid and direct manner, is as exacting an examination as you’re likely to find of why voter ID laws are corrupt and iniquitous, and why their usual rationale — to combat voter fraud — is a lie.