In a blow to voting rights advocates, Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson upheld the state’s restrictive voter ID law, which could disenfranchise as many as 750,000 citizens in the state.

Though voter ID proponents were unable to cite even a single case of voter impersonation that would justify the ID requirement, Simpson “didn’t rule on the full merits of the case,” instead limiting his scope to whether it was a proper exercise of the legislature’s authority, according to the AP. They continue:

The original rationale in Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled Legislature for the law — to prevent election fraud — played little role in the case before Simpson since the state’s lawyers acknowledged that they are “not aware of any incidents of in person voter fraud.” Instead, they insisted that lawmakers properly exercised their latitude to make election-related laws when they chose to require voters to show widely available forms of photo identification.

Voting rights advocates plan to appeal the case to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which will likely issue its own ruling before the November election. There is currently an even 3-3 split between Democrats and Republicans on the Court; the 7th Justice, Republican Joan Orie Melvin, is under suspension because of an unrelated corruption scandal.

Since Simpson ruled to uphold the law, Democrats will need one crossover vote to win a majority and strike down the law. Chief Justice Ronald Castille, a moderate Republican from Philadelphia, is most likely to side with the Democrats.

The federal Justice Department is also looking into whether Pennsylvania’s voter ID complies with federal law.

Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO)

So it is a bit surprising to see that Akin is now running an ad attacking Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), the woman he wants to replace in the United States Senate, for being insufficiently loyal to Medicare:

Akin fights to protect and strengthen Medicare and Social Security, defending our Missouri values. Claire McCaskill voted with Obama 98 percent of the time. was the deciding vote to pass Obamacare, voted to cut and gut Medicare by $700 billion.

Watch it:

Again, Todd Akin believes Medicare is unconstitutional. So the truth is that he wants to “protect and strengthen” Medicare in the same way that Luke Skywalker fought to protect and strengthen the Death Star.

Yet while Akin’s ad is impossible to square with his actual beliefs, it is unlikely to be the first such ad from a staunchly anti-Medicare candidate attacking their opponent for somehow undermining Medicare. GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan is the author of a GOP plan to privatize Medicare, slash Medicare benefits and then phase out the Medicare program over time — a fact which the Romney campaign quickly identified as a serious liability to their chances of winning in November. In an effort to neutralize this liability, Team Romney started attacking President Obama for allegedly cutting $700 billion from Medicare almost immediate after the Ryan pick was announced.

The truth, of course, is that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act redirects wasteful Medicare spending, such as billions in unnecessary giveaways to insurance companies, to better uses such as providing prescription drugs for seniors. Paul Ryan’s most recent budget, by contrast, would also eliminate this wasteful spending — but would use the savings to pay for tax cuts for the rich.