THE CHALLENGERS CHALLENGED: Two federal judges have ruled that parties may not have challengers at the polls in Ohio.

This is a unliateral victory for the Democrats. As I’ve said before, I don’t see any reason to prefer maximising turnout, at the expense of allowing fraud, any more than I think we should prefer to root out every last case of fraud, at the expense of deterring legal voters. The law ought to try to strike a balance, but for reasons I don’t understand, we’ve decided to max out turnout even though this means allowing quite a bit of fraud. Since what scant evidence we have indicates that dead, canine, and imaginary voters break heavily Democratic, this will hurt Bush on election day.