This past Friday the Supreme Court issued an order setting aside a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals order forcing Ohio’s secretary of state Jennifer Brunner to verify the accuracy of the information provided on applications for voter registration. The Ohio Republican Party had sued to force Brunner to comply with the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) after widespread reports of voter registration fraud. The Court expressed no opinion on whether Brunner was following HAVA — it threw the case out on the grounds that the Republican party didn’t have the right to sue to force compliance.

As Heritage fellow Hans von Spakovsky notes, he made the exact same argument the Court just made when he worked for the Department of Justice in 2004. Except then it was Democrats asserting that HAVA included a private right of action and Democrats later attacked him for that very position when he was appointed to the Federal Election Commission. Leaving the left’s blatant hypocrisy aside, who can enforce state compliance with HAVA to prevent election fraud? Only the Department of Justice.

We have no idea why DoJ has declined to investigate ACORN’s blatant election fraud in Ohio (and across the country), but this report from The Examiner‘s Quin Hillyer might just be relevant: “In all, DOJ lawyers and staff in the metro area have donated at least $150,000 to Obama. No wonder they seem more interested in prosecuting those who warn against vote fraud than enforcing vote-fraud laws.”