Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s counterstroke against the Ohio GOP’s legal victory forcing her to come up with a plan to verify all of Ohio’s new voters? Appealing to the Supreme Court on the grounds that forcing the new voters to cast provisional ballots will disenfranchise hundreds of thousands. As idredit pointed out in my previous diary this one is going all the way to the top.
Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide how 200,000 Ohioans will be voting in the presidential election.
Brunner wants those newly registered voters to use regular ballots. The Ohio Republican Party would prefer that they fill out provisional ballots to give boards of elections time to determine whether they are eligible to vote or not.
Late Wednesday, Brunner appealed a ruling from the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that would force her to cross-check the names of people who have registered to vote or updated registrations since Jan. 1 against a state driver’s license database. She would then have to tell Ohio’s 88 boards of elections how to deal with people who don’t match up.
Brunner fears voter suppression if the appeals court decision stands, since many provisional ballots are not counted for a variety of technicalities.
The GOP says a reversal of the appeals ruling would increase chances of voter fraud.
The court could decide to take up the case today.
At stake here is just how tough voter verification laws need to be surrounding the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, passed after Florida in 2000.
The Republicans argue that ideally anything less than 100% certainty and Federal uniformity in state voter eligibility laws will result in voter registration fraud and vote fraud, and that the right to vote is the most cherished right in America and therefore should be the most protected, and that if Americans seriously want to exercise that right, they must be willing to endure close scrutiny on behalf of the country. There is plenty of evidence that rigged elections throughout the world are a problem.
Democrats argue that there’s no evidence of the kind of voter fraud the Republicans are complaining about, and that they are in fact trying to surpress millions of minority and poor voters — traditionally Democratic voters — in order to assure Republicans win elections. There’s plenty of evidence to support laws designed to reduce turnout of these groups in our own history, laws struck down as unconstitutional burdens upon these voters.
The Supreme Court, if they take up the decision, could be deciding the future of voting in this country. It’s very possible that the Supreme Court ruling will be used as a precedent across the country for minimum standards in voter eligibility checks. If they rule in favor of the Ohio GOP and do define strict guildelines for voter eligibility in the Buckeye State, there will be precedent to possibly rework voter eligibility laws across the country, and the challenges the GOP can make to new voters across the country, perhaps even in this election.
How much chaos would it cause if dozens of states that didn’t already meet the strict guidelines the Supreme Court could hand down to Ohio had to then force all their new voters into provisional ballots? Millions of votes could get rejected across the country for not meeting the criteria, and that could turn an Obama landslide into a McSame victory.
If they side with Secretary Brunner, it may be a pyrrhic victory as well. Certainly the right wing Wurlitzer will sound off that more than ever McSame must win the election in order to replace the Supreme Court’s “judicial activists” with “patriotic Americans” and will motivate even more hatred and bile against Obama than before. He will be seen as illegitimate by possibly millions of Americans, and it would only take one to possibly bring him harm, most likely spouting that famous Jeffersonian quote about the Tree of Liberty needing to be refreshed by the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Whether or not you agree that the GOP is trying to steal THIS election (I believe they are, they always play to win) they will try to set the stage for as much dehumanizing hatred as possible against Barack Obama. There will be violence eventually. It’s just a matter of how deadly and widespread it will be. In these dire economic times, economic times that will get far, far worse before they get better, we will see good people do bad things in the name of what they believe to be justice.
This Supreme Court decision could become the GOP’s final revenge against us all.
Update [2008-10-17 13:28:0 by Zandar1]: For now Brunner has won. In a 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court sided with Brunner that the GOP wasn’t going to win its argument that it could sue Brunner in the first place over this.
However the issue hasn’t been completely decided yet. This is a punt by the Supremes for sure, but it’s a punt that will run out the clock for the Ohio GOP. But, this isn’t the last we’ve seen of this issue.
Update 2 [2008-10-17 13:40:28 by Zandar1]: The Ohio GOP is unhappy.
“This decision was made on a technicality, not on the merits of the case. The justices did not disagree with our argument that Jennifer Brunner has failed to comply with federal election law. They merely said we don’t have a right to bring a private challenge against her under this particular provision.
Secretary Brunner has fought every effort to validate hundreds of thousands of questionable registrations. Two courts and numerous judges have accused her of failing provide an adequate system of verifying that information. The Supreme Court’s ruling has not changed that, and we continue to believe Secretary Brunner is neglecting her basic duty under the law to prevent fraud from corrupting Ohio’s election system.
We are again calling on the Secretary of State to comply with federal law by providing clear instructions to election administrators on how to handle questionable voter registration forms.
As far as I’m concerned, Secretary Brunner is actively working to conceal fraudulent activity in this election. As many as 200,000 registrations submitted this year have been flagged for discrepancies.”
Democrats cannot be elected legitimately. That is the message the GOP is pushing this year. You can bet this will be the “reason why McSame lost” and that the “vote fraud” meme will become the new battle cry of the disaffected right.
Update 3 [2008-10-17 13:45:32 by Zandar1]: SCOTUSBlog has more.
The state GOP had complained that the Ohio Secretary of State had violated her duty, under federal election procedures law, to share with county election boards the lists of voters whose names in a voter registration database do not match data in the state’s drivers’ license files. The GOP argued that the secretary of state had put a stop to required efforts to pass along the non-matching data so that local election officials could deal with it. Lack of matches could be the basis for challenges.
The Supreme Court said it was not expressing any opinion on whether the state official had violated any duty under federal law. But, it said, it was not persuaded that the federal law gives a private party — like the state GOP — a right to go to court to enforce those provisions in the Help America Vote Act.
Under that act, voters whose eligibility is challenged at the polls may have to file proveisional ballots, which would be counted only if their right to vote had been verified. Because Democrats have succeeded widely in efforts to register voters, it was generally assumed that such challenges in this election cycle would fall more heavily on that party than on the GOP. Tens of thousands of registrations might have been put in issue.
The Supreme Court, acting on the case after the Circuit Justice, Justice John Paul Stevens referred the matter to the full bench, not only granted the secretary of state’s plea to stay the federal judge’s temporary restraining order, but actually vacated it, thus removing any legal obligation spelled out in that order.
So yes, it’s a punt…but a timely one.
