Court ruling could keep thousands of Ohio voters from the polls - International Herald Tribune

Court ruling could keep thousands of Ohio voters from the polls - International Herald Tribune

Court ruling could keep thousands of Ohio voters from the polls
By Ian Urbina
Published: October 16, 2008
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More than 200,000 registered Ohio voters may be blocked from casting regular ballots on Election Day because of a court decision requiring the disclosure of lists of voters whose names did not match those on U.S. government databases, state election officials and voting experts say.

The court decision requires Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, to provide the names to local election officials by Friday.

Once the local officials have the names, they may require those voters to cast provisional ballots rather than regular ones, and they may ask poll workers, who are often associated with a political party, to challenge the voters on Election Day. Both possibilities could cause widespread problems when people show up at the polls.

Concerns about those problems led the Ohio attorney general on Wednesday to file an appeal of the decision, which was made by a federal appeals court last week, to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Brunner. The 50-page decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, in Cincinnati, reversed a 2-to-1 ruling by a three-judge panel of the same circuit.

The state's appeal went directly to Justice John Paul Stevens because he oversees the Sixth Circuit, which includes Ohio. It argued that the Republican Party had nearly two years to raise complaints about the process of screening voter registrations and failed to do so. Any changes now to the process would disrupt preparations for the election, it contended.
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U.S. law requires states to verify voter registration applications with a government database like those for driver's licenses or Social Security cards. Names that do not match are flagged for further verification. Since Democrats have been more aggressive at registering new voters this year, the decision will probably affect their party's supporters disproportionately. Polling in the state shows Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, with a slight lead on his Republican challenger, Senator John McCain.

Republicans have been angered by reports of voter registration fraud linked to groups allied with Democrats, like Acorn, a community organizing group with ties to Obama. This month, the Ohio Republican Party filed a motion seeking to require Brunner, a Democrat, to hand over the list of all registration applications that had been flagged when checked using the state or federal databases.

In court papers, Republicans said they wanted the names to file challenges of their identities.

Requiring voters to cast provisional ballots rather than regular ones is a concern because such ballots involve added verification and are often disqualified, voting experts said.

It remains unclear when access to the lists would be given to local election officials. The appellate judges upheld a lower-court ruling giving Brunner until Friday to make the list available.

Social Security data indicate that Ohio election officials found more than 200,000 names that did not match this year, and state election officials say their analysis of the data shows that most of these are individual voters, not duplicate registrations. But Brunner said that problems with the databases could be the reason the names did not match.

"Federal government red tape, misstated technical information or glitches in databases should not be the basis for voters having to cast provisional ballots," Brunner said.

She added that she planned to require that notifications be sent to all voters whose records have discrepancies, so they might have time to clear up problems before the election on Nov. 4
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