Can McCain Steal The Election?

God knows they're trying-- primarily by disqualifying hundreds of thousands of voters. What does that say about a political party? That their strategy is not to persuade voters that their positions are best for the country, but to disenfranchise them in as many places as they can. Right now, Republicans are doing all they can to prevent as many people from voting in swing states like Colorado, Virginia, New Mexico, and, of course, Ohio. Just as Diageo comes out with a devastating new national poll showing McCain losing more and more ground the more negative his campaign goes, the Supreme Court, in a 9-6 ruling, may have handed McCain's campaign its death blow by throwing out Republican Party attempts to prevent newly registered voters from voting. What a party! The ScotusBlog has the full story:

The Supreme Court on Friday lifted a federal judge’s order that would have required Ohio election officials to set up new procedures to verify voter registration across the state in the weeks before the Nov. 4 balloting.  The unsigned (”Per Curiam”) order is here.  The order blunts an effort by the Ohio Republican Party to gain access to registration data that would enable it to challenge voters’ eligibility at polling places.

The state GOP had complained that the Ohio Secretary of State had violated her duty, under federal election procedures law, to share with county election boards the lists of voters whose names in a voter registration database do not match data in the state’s drivers’ license files.  The GOP argued that the secretary of state had put a stop to required efforts to pass along the non-matching data so that local election officials could deal with it. Lack of matches could be the basis for challenges.

They won't give up. Cheating is all they have left and this is their livelihood at stake. They will fight and fight and fight and even after they're whipped, they're keep fighting. We must do the same. And we need to keep calling them on their lies and smears and on their hypocrisy. And there is no Republican goon more hypocritical than Gordon Smith (R-OR)-- and I love the way the DSCC highlighted it today: