The 2008 Election Fiasco Is Now Assured

The 2008 election fiasco is now assured as Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has made it abundantly clear that no provisional ballots will be rejected. There will be no review of provisional ballots to determine whether those casting such ballots are legitimately entitled to vote.

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.

Meanwhile, a Wisconsin judge tossed a suit there by the Wisconsin Attorney General to force compliance with the federal HAVA. The grounds on which the Wisconsin suit was tossed? The Wisconsin Attorney General lacked the standing to sue under HAVA. That's precisely how the US Supreme Court ruled on the Ohio case when it came up last week.

UPDATE:
As if that wasn't enough, the Obama campaign website doesn't seem to bother with standard credit card verification procedures to ensure that fraud and possible criminality doesn't occur. Hot Air, Ace, Flip, and others are now reporting that the Obama website is accepting credit card campaign contributions without any kind of security verification that the information submitted matches the card holder information on record with the credit card companies. Credit card companies generally require address verification to see whether possible fraud is underway. If the records provided don't match the information submitted, the transaction gets bounced. If enough transactions from a vendor get bounced, the credit card companies usually raise the fees or cancel the vendor's accounts altogether.

The situation as it appears to exist right now is ripe for fraud, abuse, and circumvention of the campaign finance laws and limits on donations.

If the cardholder in question doesn't question the charges, the credit card company isn't going to bother delving in to the transaction. The Obama campaign simply is playing with fire to accept as many donations from as many sources as possible, without regard to the law or even common sense. It also opens the door to foreign sources providing donations without any trouble.

After all, if Adolph Hitler, John Galt, and Mickey Mouse can give campaign contributions, who is anyone to argue? Heck, even the New York Times was picking out the Obama campaign for this problem weeks ago.

Meanwhile, the fraudsters in Ohio will not be prosecuted. Instead, two registrations will be canceled and 11 absentee ballots wont be counted. How exactly is that justice? These individuals sought to commit fraud and undermine the electoral system, and they don't even get a slap on the wrist. Something is seriously wrong with the water in Ohio.

UPDATE:
Patrick Ruffini weighs in and concludes this is clearly enabling fraud. The campaign clearly was on notice that their systems were set up to enable fraudulent donations to come flooding in, and did nothing about it. Will the Justice Department and the FEC get on the case?