2012 Decoded

Has a Pennsylvania court done what the Romney campaign has been unable to: Erase President Obama's advantage in the state?

A trial judge Wednesday upheld Pennsylvania's much-criticized voter ID law, finding no evidence that voters in the state would be disenfranchised despite testimony at trial that suggested that more than 750,000 voters lack the necessary government-issued identification to vote in November. (Advocacy groups and some experts have argued that the number is more than 1 million. Earlier estimates had the figure much lower, closer to 100,000.)

And Robert Simpson, the commonwealth court judge who heard the challenge to the law, didn't necessarily dispute those estimates in his ruling. Simpson wrote that the plaintiffs in the case "are among the hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians who are eligible to vote, but who lack an acceptable form of ID." At the same time, Simpson acknowledged that the state had offered no concrete proof of in-person voter fraud in the state--the evil that the voter ID law was intended to remedy.

Slam dunk, right?