Wisconsin judge throws out voter ID lawsuit

By GottaLaff

First Ohio, now Wisconsin. Maybe the Republicans should take a hint: Elections should be fair. Voter suppression is so 2004:

A judge on Thursday threw out a lawsuit by Wisconsin's attorney general demanding that state elections officials confirm hundreds of thousands of voters' identities before election day.

Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi ruled that neither federal nor state law makes the checks that Atty. Gen. J.B. Van Hollen seeks a condition for voting. She said Van Hollen had no standing to sue and should have made a complaint to the state Government Accountability Board rather than going to court.

Van Hollen spokesman Kevin St. John said the state Department of Justice would appeal, perhaps directly to the state Supreme Court. The agency will continue to pursue the case beyond election day if it must because an accurate list of registered voters is crucial to future elections, he said.

Van Hollen, a Republican and co-chairman of GOP presidential candidate John McCain's Wisconsin campaign, argued that the federal Help America Vote Act requires the accountability board to check the names of everyone registered to vote since Jan. 1, 2006, against driver's license and Social Security data and remove any ineligible voters from the rolls. [...]

Sumi said only the U.S. attorney general could bring a court order to enforce the federal voting act.

A similar case in Ohio resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court's rebuffing Ohio Republicans' efforts to force Ohio's election overseer -- a Democrat -- to give local election boards lists of 200,000 voters whose names didn't match other databases.

Rebuffed at every turn.