Federal Court Slams Ohio Election Chief on Voter Registration Checks

Appeals Court TRO Upholds Ohio GOP, Directs SOS to Verify Voter Eligibility by Friday

OhioNewsBureau

with John Michael Spinelli

Columbus, Ohio: On Tuesday a full federal appeals court reversed a decision rendered last Friday by a panel of three of its judges that said the Ohio secretary of state did not have to provide voter registration verification to Ohio's 88 county election boards.

The stunning reversal of fortune for Ohio's chief election officer, Jennifer BrunnerJennifer Brunner, a Democrat, is sweet victory for Ohio Republicans, who have been waging war with her since she took office in 2007. With only weeks before Election Day, Ohio Republicans have become exercised over reports ofvoter registration fraud, especially by the national community organizing group ACORN, which has undertaken a voter registration drive in other states that produced 1.3 million new voters, a figure Republicans and the campaign of John S. McCain dispute as valid and are challenging as fraudulent.

The AP story reported by Philip Elliott is that the full 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld a lower court's ruling that Brunner must use other government records to check the thousands of new voters for registration fraud. This "enbanc" decision overrules the decision last Friday by a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit that said, for reasons including the lack of time before the election, state election officials did not have to inform local boards of elections of mismatches so they could investigate further or help resolve discrepancies that might only be the result of unintentional administrative errors.

Bob BennettBob Bennett, Ohio GOP chairman since 1988, is getting his political pound of flesh. "Her delay in providing this matching system leaves little time for election officials to act on questionable registrations," Ohio GOP Chairman Bob Bennett said Tuesday night, according to the AP. The man who Brunner fired from his job of running the Cuyahoga Board of Elections in early 2007, just a few weeks after she took office, is no doubt reveling in the political ramifications of the court's decision.

The name of the lawsuit, Ohio Republican Party versus Jennifer Brunner, succinctly tells the story of the bruising battle that's been waged since Brunner's first day on the job in 2007, when she became the first Democratic secretary of state in 16 years and the first women ever to hold the post. A series of challenges to the registrations have been filed by Ohio Republicans against Brunner for her administration of election rules. Registration rules, absentee ballot requests and an overlap period that allowed newly registered voters to cast an absentee ballot on the same-day have been the focus of Republican-led lawsuits.

In the weeks leading to elections, issues of voter suppression are generally pushed by Democrats while issues of voter fraud are generally fodder for Republicans. Such gamesmanship in Ohio is common practice, and this year is no different, as Ohio again comes center stage as a battleground state that will make either Sen. Barack ObamaBarack Obama or Sen. John McCainJohn McCain the next president, should they win the Buckeye State's 20 Electoral College votes. The contest between Obama and McCain is a statistical dead-heat. Bush won Ohio in 2000 and in 2004, but by only 118,601 votes. This year, with new voter registrations up dramatically, 666,000 new Ohio voters could be added to voter rolls if all are legitimate.

With about three weeks to November 4th, Brunner had previously said there wasn't enough time to set up the system. With the court's ruling, she will have to find the time to do it, which puts more pressure on her self-styled slogan of "preparing for success" in November.

Brunner, a former common pleas court judge whose decisions as secretary of state have been slammed by Ohio courts on more than one occasion, said nothing in the Help America Vote Act of 2002 required her to do what the district court ordered. Brunner has used this line of reasoning -- the law didn't "provide" for me to do something -- as justification for some actions, like not allowing observers for voter registration. She will now have to verify new registrations by comparing information with the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles or the Social Security Administration.

Columbus Paper Spanks Brunner on Election Integrity

In its lead editorial from last Sunday, The Columbus Dispatch again spanked Brunner for "provoking doubt" and fueling "suspicion about integrity of Ohio elections."

Send a tip or news story to ohionewsbureau@gmail.com