Proud Member of The Moms Clean Air Force
Print This Post
Oct
17
This New York Times article, dated tomorrow in its URL, further clarifies today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision that will allow Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to let the 88 county boards of elections proceed unimpeded by public record requests from the Ohio Republican Party in its effort to hunt down and challenge any voter who may have mismatched information between their registration and their driver’s license or social security number:
A 2002 federal law, the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, requires states to check voter registration applications against government databases like those for driver’s license records. Names that do not match are flagged. Ohio Republicans sought to require Ms. Brunner to provide information about mismatches to local officials.
Those officials could use information to require voters to cast provisional ballots rather than regular ones. They could also allow partisan poll workers to challenge people on the lists. Given Democratic success in registering new voters this year, those actions would probably affect that party’s supporters disproportionately.
Again, ironically, Joe the Plumber ends up being a better standard-bearer for this problem than he does for Barack Obama’s or John McCain’s economic and tax plans.
Legal experts mentioned in the article applaud the decision by SCOTUS:
Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State, said the Supreme Court’s action in letting state authorities handle matters in the face of a late challenge was consistent with a general premise of election law. “Federal court intervention is a last resort, even if it’s not at the last minute,” Professor Foley said.
…
Voting experts and state election officials added that many voters were likely to be flagged erroneously because the databases used to check voter registrations were prone to errors. Most non-matches are the result of typographical errors by government officials, computer errors, use of nicknames or middle initials, not voter ineligibility, they said.
In one audit of match failures in 2004 by New York City election officials, more than 80 percent of the failures were found to have resulted from errors by government officials; most of the remaining failures were because of immaterial discrepancies between the two records. [my emphasis]
Eighty percent of failures were from government officials’ errors. The remaining were immaterial discrepancies. And yet the Ohio Republican Party wanted to get information on all 200,000 mismatches from each of the 88 boards of elections and then use that information to challenge every single one that might vote for a Democrat.
Why are these machinations so extreme and important to Ohio and Ohioans? Because, as the NYT article reminds us:
In 2004, President George W. Bush won Ohio by a margin of about 118,000 votes. During that race, litigation over Republican plans to challenge about 35,000 voters went to Justice John Paul Stevens on the eve of the election. Justice Stevens said it was too close to the election to intervene, but he added that he expected both sides to act in good faith. The Republicans dropped plans for their challenges.
Existential conversation for another day: how is it that the notion of “patriotism” does not apply across the board in terms of making sure that as many legal votes as possible are permitted and counted but rather gets wielded by legal complainants in a way that completely violates the purpose of public records, public office and voter protection laws?
By Jill Miller Zimon at 3:20 pm October 17th, 2008 in Courts, Elections, Jennifer Brunner, Law, Ohio, Politics, Republicans, Voting, WH2008
Comments
One Response to “NYT clarifies Brunner v. Ohio Republican Party further”
Voted into Top 25 Political Mom Blogs
Now on sale-WLST essay included!
Posts About Pepper Pike City Council2010 WE Magazine 101 Women Bloggers to Watch
Category Specific RSS
Pepper Pike Cleveland+ Politics Women Ohio Elections Law Jewish
[...] While the bill contained many well-meant and intelligent reforms, events in Ohio in recent weeks have shown that the law has become the bludgeon with which the Republican party expects to engineer the theft [...]