Keep this in mind when Democrats attempt to claim that Republicans steal elections through undemocratic dirty tricks. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a lefty hack, is already disqualifying John McCain supporters from voting based on…well, no law whatsoever. It’s already spawned lawsuits but I’d be surprised to see her tactics stopped.

If Ohio polling looks like Chicago, ‘thank’ Brunner

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has a reputation as the most partisan state official in Ohio. And she works hard to earn it. The Democrat’s latest stunt rejected absentee ballots for thousands of Republicans.

But it’s not her first rodeo. Almost as soon as Brunner was elected in 2006, she tried to remove several Republican county elections officials, including Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert Bennett. They accused her of “storm trooper tactics” to silence critics.

Then Brunner spread an alarm that Ohio’s electronic voting machines were vulnerable to tampering – a favorite claim of the paranoid left. Elections officials who participated in Brunner’s study called her conclusions over-hyped “leaps in logic” and said, “The report itself could be viewed as an attack on the elections system … (that) planted seeds in the mind of the public to mistrust those who oversee elections.”

Brunner also demanded an overhaul of voting methods just before the March primaries, causing meltdowns in some precincts.

And now she’s hassling Republicans who want to vote for John McCain.

Two Hamilton County voters have sued, accusing her of “the disenfranchisement of thousands of voters.”

The John McCain campaign sent out more than 1 million applications for absentee ballots to Republicans. Each had a line at the top next to a box: “I am a qualified elector.”

Brunner sent a memo telling county election officials to reject those applications for absentee ballots if the box was not checked. “Failure to check the box leaves both the applicant and the board of elections without verification that the applicant is a ‘qualified elector’,” she wrote.

But that’s contrary to state law and Brunner doesn’t have the authority, according to the lawsuit and an opinion from Hamilton County’s Republican Prosecutor Joe Deters.

Remember, though: This is the party who chants, “Count every vote!”. I eagerly await Barack Obama’s strong condemnation of such undemocratic tactics.