One of the GOP talking points Tony Snow was spewing on “Real Time” last night was that there’s a “serious” problem with voter fraud - that is, people voting illegally.

Everyone knows this is pretty much bullshit. Yeah, the big-city machines have been known to have a few ghosts vote now and again, but the Justice Department has cleaned up most of that mess and we have much bigger problems with the election system.

That’s why the Supreme Court case this week is such a crock. Jeffrey Toobin:

As the Demos report observes, “Overall, the disfranchisement of voters through antiquated voting systems, errors, mismanagement of registration bases, and intimidation or harassment is a far bigger problem today than traditional forms of election fraud.” (These issues, it need hardly be added, were the real problem in Florida in 2000.) Unfortunately, the only serious attempt to address the legacy of 2000, the federal Help America Vote Act, which passed in 2002, today ranks somewhere between a disappointment and a fiasco. In essence, that law issued an unfunded mandate to the states to improve their voting procedures by 2006. Some states, like New York, largely ignored it; others, like Florida and Ohio, the states that, respectively, decided the past two Presidential elections, invested in systems that were, in many cases, less reliable than the old ones.

This week, a majority of the Justices will likely find a way to make a bad situation worse, and uphold the Indiana law. As a general matter, in recent years the Court has been reluctant to find what is charged in this case: a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws. (The notable exception, to belabor the issue, was for a plaintiff named George W. Bush.) In the end, though, it will not be the judiciary that rescues democracy; whatever the obstacles, the problems with the ballot box must be solved at the ballot box.