Okay, see, no.

A Tight Election May Be Tangled in Legal Battles

The November presidential election, widely expected to rest on a final blitz of advertising and furious campaigning, may also hinge nearly as much on last-minute legal battles over when and how ballots should be cast and counted, particularly if the race remains tight in battleground states.

In the last few weeks, nearly a dozen decisions in federal and state courts on early voting, provisional ballots and voter identification requirements have driven the rules in conflicting directions, some favoring Republicans demanding that voters show more identification to guard against fraud and others backing Democrats who want to make voting as easy as possible.

The most closely watched cases — in the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania — will see court arguments again this week, with the Ohio dispute possibly headed for a request for emergency review by the Supreme Court.

That right there? That is not accurate. In neither Pennsylvania nor Ohio is the state arguing that voting restrictions are necessary to combat fraud.

In Pennsylvania, the state formally stipulated that they were unaware of any fraud and that there was unlikely to be any fraud even if the ID law was overturned.

In Ohio, I'm having trouble finding a news article but this is a copy of the judge's opinion restoring early voting, and he summarizes the parties' arguments - nothing about fraud there either, just the administrative burdens of keeping the polls open.

So it's incredibly misleading for the NYT to frame its article about voting restrictions around the concept of voter fraud, as though that's actually the official justification for these laws. Even before we get to the obvious bullshit of that excuse, in some states, that isn't even how the laws are being defended.