The Brunner Situation

I don't think people quite understand the seriousness of the Brunner situation. Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, has been forced by the Sixth Circuit to do her job and cull the voter rolls of discrepancies.

She had claimed that doing so would violate the law and disenfranchise people. That's total nonsense since the only people disenfranchised by such actions would be those trying to vote fraudulently, dead people, or felons. Legitimate voters have nothing to worry about and clearing the rolls of the fraudulent registrations protects our right to vote and ensure that the results are not gamed by those who seek an outcome.

She had claimed that there wasn't enough time to act to clear the rolls. That she sat on this huge stinking pile for so long and fought with Republicans to do her job means that there's little time to verify the legitimate voters from those bogus registrations.

How many are we talking about?

200,000 registrations.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner estimated that an initial review found that about 200,000 newly registered voters reported information that did not match motor-vehicle or Social Security records, Brunner spokesman Kevin Kidder said. Some discrepancies could be as simple as a misspelling, while others could be more significant.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati sided with the Ohio Republican Party on Tuesday and ordered Brunner to set up a system that provides those names to county elections boards. The GOP contends the information will help prevent fraud.

"Things already are in motion to comply," Kidder said. "We're working to establish these processes on how we can make this work. The computer work actually began last week."

About 666,000 Ohioans have registered to vote since January.

Brunner previously cross-checked new-voter registrations with databases run by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicle and the Social Security Administration and made the results available online, but the 6th Circuit said the information was not accessible in a way that would help county election boards ferret out mismatches.

Nearly 1/3 of all registrations submitted have some kind of problem. How exactly does that work?

Those discrepancies could be anything from misspelled names to failing to provide change of address forms to outright fraud and misrepresentation of information on registration information to get a chance to vote multiple times.

We just don't know how many fall into each column.

Brunner was never going to let anyone find out.

She was jeopardizing the trust in the system to count the legitimate votes and prevent those who should not be voting from being able to cast ballots.

No one would be disenfranchised by any of this. People who are not found to be on voter rolls would still be able to cast provisional ballots, and those votes would be counted once they are verified.

Ace weighs in and goes postal on Brunner for her incompetence and facilitation of voter fraud by not clearing voter rolls of those who do not belong. He also points out that Michelle Malkin has uncovered a website dedicated to facilitating election fraud by getting Obama supporters in contact with each other to register in swing states and providing addresses (sometimes 50 in one house) so that they can cast absentee ballots.

Law enforcement has been slow to react to this criminal enterprise as well.

Allahpundit also weighs in. How many of the mismatched registrations are ACORN related?