Supreme Court finds student ID voting too confusing 12 days out, finds nothing confusing about a voter-purge database.

…(cont) I had the raincoat on — the one I've got, there's only the one — because it was doing that thing where it's not quite raining but you'd be a fool not to wear it anyway. On the way to the store I went through the toll plaza, the one with the transponder lane next to the cash lane. My sticker's old, peeling at the corner since maybe 2019. The reader doesn't ask who's driving. It reads the number off the sticker and the gate's up before I've touched the brake. Hasn't asked me to prove the car's mine, not this year.

The woman in the cash lane ahead of me had a dispute going — a ten-dollar toll from three months back the machine says she owes and she says she doesn't. She pulled out her license to settle it, which took about four minutes, a person checking a face against a card, over ten dollars.

Four minutes for ten dollars with a face attached to it. Under two seconds for my sticker, no face in it at all.

That's a toll plaza, not a court case. But it's what I kept thinking about, reading the list back.

Because here's what I wrote down — give me a second, it's in here — the order on the database, the one from September, the Fox piece on it says it was allowed to go forward during the appeal, on account of a law that otherwise keeps a purge program like it out of the ninety days before an election. During the appeal. That's the reason given. Not confusion. The order on the ID, the one from Thursday, gives confusion as its reason, with the vote twelve days out.

So there it is. The database doesn't get checked again for confusion once the calendar gets this close — it just keeps running, the appeal still pending, same as September. The ID does get checked again, and the thing that gets it is confusion, this close to the vote.

One of those two was built to add a name to the rolls at the polling place — a kid showing a card with their picture on it. The other one was built to take names off the rolls somewhere behind a server, months before anyone sees a ballot. Confusion stopped the first one cold, twelve days out. I haven't found where confusion stopped the second one. I looked. It's not in the piece from September and it's not in the piece from Thursday.

Oh — hold on, before you go. One more line, since I've got the page open anyway. Both orders are sitting on the books the same twelve days before the election. One of them says, in the order itself, that it's too close to the vote to risk confusion. What does the record say the other one is too close to the vote to risk?