Brunner Says No to Mismatch Challenges

by Stephan Tawney on October 23, 2008

The Supreme Court rules 7-2 that a Florida recount must stop and we don’t stop hearing about it for 8 years. A Democratic Secretary of State says that election officials can’t challenge voters because their information doesn’t line up and it’s barely covered. You want to see what stealing an election actually looks like? Here ‘ya go.

Elections officials cannot challenge voters on Election Day or reject absentee ballots based solely on discrepancies from verifying new voter registrations, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said yesterday in directives to counties.

It’s the latest development from the controversy about what should be done when personal information from new voters doesn’t match state motor vehicle or federal Social Security records in an automatic computer check.

The Ohio Republican Party had sued Brunner to force her to provide lists of voters with mismatches to counties as a way to correct registration errors and weed out any fraud.

Although the GOP did not prevail in court, Brunner issued the directives because counties have access to mismatches by examining individual voter records.

Ohio law no longer allows challengers at the polls, but poll workers have the power to question a voter’s eligibility. One of Brunner’s directives says voters may not be challenged based solely on mismatch data.

The other directive says county elections workers cannot uses mismatches as the basis for not counting an absentee ballot.

An estimated 200,000 of the nearly 786,000 new registrations in Ohio this year have mismatches, Brunner’s office has said.

Still, Ohio GOP Deputy Chairman Kevin DeWine said that Brunner has not given county elections officials access to the mismatches in a way they could realistically use to determine the reason for any discrepancy.

“At this point, she’s telling elections officials what to do with information she hasn’t even provided them,” DeWine said. “Until she releases the 200,000 questionable registrations on file in her office, this directive is worthless.”

Lawyers for the Ohio GOP met yesterday with Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, representing Brunner, seeking a solution to the dispute out of court. But Brunner made it clear the meeting was not to negotiate.

Apparently having them cast provisional ballots, which allows to vote to count once the information is matched, would “disenfranchise” voters. Translation: She wants to make sure people who may have fictitious information can still vote for Obama, handing the state to him. Don’t count on the media to give a crap, either.

Via Ace.



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