Reading over Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Voter ID case, it occurs to me that the case shares a lot of structural similarities with McConnell v. FEC, 540 U.S. 93 (2003), the McCain-Feingold/BCRA campaign finance case. In both cases, there were two basic issues: (1) What's the degree of scrutiny for a facial challenge to a statute that is claimed to infringe on constitutional rights central to the voting process, and (2) How much evidence is there of a problem in need of correction, and how hard should the courts look for it?

  Of course, the two cases raise different issues, and as with any two cases, different Justices can vote differently for lots of perfectly legitimate reasons. Still, it's interesting to note that the statutes in the two cases have generally opposite political polarities — while Voter ID laws tend to be supported by Republicans and opposed by Democrats, the 41 "no" votes against BCRA in the Senate were 38 Republicans and 3 Democrats — and there was only one Justice of the seven on the Court for both cases who voted either to uphold both laws or strike both down. And the vote of that one Justice, Justice Stevens, has of course been the subject of considerable speculation to answer the puzzle of why he voted as he did.