Chief Justice Roberts said he would have returned the case to the lower court to apply the standard he proposed.
The way for the court to prove them wrong is to start taking the right to vote more seriously, and to apply the standard in future election cases.
She said the department would monitor the companies' actions and impose fines or take other disciplinary action against those that do not apply the standard fairly.
"The Oregon Supreme Court applied the wrong Constitutional standard," Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the majority in 2007, and it should now "apply the standard we have set forth".
Today Mr. Hollings teasingly urged Mr. Evans to apply the standard that the senator suggested had been adopted by the Bush camp in the long battle over the Florida election outcome.
Mr. Rosenbaum said the Supreme Court should clarify the standards for defining disability and then either rule for Ms. Williams or instruct the lower courts to apply the standard.
Legal experts, as well as two dissenting judges on the constitutional court, called it a violation of legal principles to retroactively apply the standard of citizenship established in the 2010 Constitution.
But David B. Golomb, president of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, one of the plaintiffs, said in an interview that insurers themselves determined what was "clear and reasonable," and he held that companies could not be trusted to apply the standard fairly.
Mr. Stewart made other jokes on Wednesday, but it was actually more disconcerting to watch Mr. Stewart apply the standard liberal critique to Mr. Obama than it was to see the president of the United States bandy words with the host of a late-night comedy show.
In order to analyse asymptotic reliability for such systems we cannot apply the standard ergodic methods.
