Fox News is calling recent court decisions blocking voter ID laws a “setback,” despite the fact that these decisions will allow more people to engage in the political process.

On October 9, the Supreme Court issued an order temporarily blocking Wisconsin's voter ID law -- a law that The New York Times called “one of the strictest in the nation.” Even though these kinds of voter ID laws disproportionately affect people of color and in-person voter fraud is almost nonexistent, right-wing media outlets has repeatedly celebrated them. National Review Online was highly supportive of Wisconsin's law in particular, and it called fears that the new ID requirements would cause “chaos at the polls” overblown because “there has been no such 'chaos' in any of the other states that have implemented voter-ID laws over the past ten years.”

Elsewhere, in Texas, a federal court struck down that state's voter ID law -- another stringent law that right-wing media have described as “a good thing.” However, in its ruling, the court called Texas' law an “unconstitutional poll tax” that “has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose.”

Yet Fox News was apparently unmoved by the Texas court's proclamation that the right to vote “defines our nation as a democracy.” On the October 10 edition of America's Newsroom, host Martha MacCallum said the “timing” of the orders was “very interesting.” Her co-host, Bill Hemmer, said the decisions were “the latest setbacks” to laws “meant to crack down on voter fraud” :

The timing is interesting, but probably not in the way MacCallum thinks. Although the court's order doesn't say why it stopped Wisconsin's law from being implemented, SCOTUSblog's Lyle Denniston suggested that “the fact that this year's election is less than a month away may have been the key factor.” In its brief in the Wisconsin case, the ACLU also argued that "[n]o court has permitted a voter ID law to go into effect this close to an election based on last-minute changes to the law." Had the law been implemented before the 2014 election, hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters could have been affected. According to the ACLU and the Advancement Project, state officials would have had “to issue some 6,000 IDs per day between now and the election” to ensure that every eligible voter had the required form of identification.