The Supreme Court let Homeland Security screen state voter rolls weeks before the midterms, then let New Hampshire reject student IDs as too close to an election.

…(cont) Hold on to that number.

Then October. All together now — the application on the Tuesday, the order on the Thursday. On Tuesday the 20th, New Hampshire officials filed an emergency petition asking the Court to lift what they called a last-minute block on their law barring student identification cards at the polls, weeks ahead of the midterms; the application came from Secretary of State David Scanlan. On Thursday the 22nd the Court granted it, reversing a federal judge's order and clearing the way for the state to fully ban student IDs for voting during the midterms. Fox News, reporting the decision, wrote that it warned of voter confusion too close to an election. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissent. In a short dissent, she wrote that she would have left the lower court's decision in place.

So: ninety days before an election is room enough to bring a federal screening program online against the voter rolls of the states. The weeks before that same election are not room enough for a clerk to keep taking a card the clerk was already taking. Same Court, same calendar, two answers.

The word the week turned on was confusion, and it is worth asking where else confusion was lying around, because the rest of the week's paper is also filings. On Monday the 12th, Common Dreams carried the New York Times's tally from Federal Election Commission records: Elon Musk has put at least $276 million into Republican groups and his own super PAC since July alone, and $366 million across the 2025-26 cycle, more than the $290 million he gave in 2023-24. Back on September 22nd, when the number was still reported as a plan to spend at least $100 million, the argument among Democrats was whether to say it out loud.

All together now, down the ledger: two hundred seventy-six million since July, three hundred sixty-six for the cycle, two hundred ninety last time. All of it on file at the Federal Election Commission, which is to say it is paperwork too, paperwork close to an election.

On Saturday the 24th, The Lever traced the Israel lobby routing millions through groups promoting women, reproductive rights, and Latino candidates, and reported that AI interests and other power brokers are adopting the method. On October 6th, Politico reported that AI safety groups are not buying OpenAI's spending retreat; they want stronger commitments to reduce the money AI super PACs are pushing into the midterms. Money with a different name on the envelope is a filing question, and the filings are accepted as filed.

Every one of those dollars arrived in public, on a form, and not one of them had to be read at a polling place by a volunteer with a line waiting behind them. The student will be asked for something else.