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?

Ohio GOP Files New Suit Against Ohio Sec. State. Brunner

The Ohio GOP has filed a new suit against Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, to compel compliance with state election law mandating the state share database information with local election boards to determine eligibility of voter registrants. This comes one day after the US Supreme Court reversed a federal court decision on grounds that the Ohio GOP lacked standing to address the issue:

Specifically, the lawsuit asks the Ohio Supreme Court to require Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to order county elections boards not to count any absentee ballot from voters registered after Jan. 1 without first checking the statewide voter registration database to ensure there is no mismatch.

If there is a mismatch, the boards would be required to determine whether the person is an eligible voter.

"This action seeks this (Ohio Supreme Court's) urgent intervention to remedy the secretary of state's steadfast refusal to fully implement the Statewide Voter Registration Database (SWVRD) in a manner required by both federal and state law -- in essence, to share 'mismatch' information regarding a registrant's driver's license or Social Security information with county boards of elections in a manner that gives those boards a meaningful opportunity to investigate the mismatches," the lawsuit says.

The court ordered that arguments by both sides must be filed by next Friday, only 10 days before the Nov. 4 election.

Brunner Appeals Voter Registration Checks To Supreme Court

Democrat Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is a piece of work, and it's going to cost Ohio dearly. She's refusing to carry out state and federal law requiring that she check voter registrations to ensure that they're accurate. Instead, she's appealing the Sixth Circuit's decision requiring that she comply with state law and taking the case to the US Supreme Court.

A spokesman for Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said Thursday that an appeal has been filed with the high court.

On Tuesday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati sided with the Ohio Republican Party and ordered Brunner to set up a system that provides names of newly registered voters whose driver's license numbers or Social Security numbers don't match records in other government databases.

The GOP contends the information will help prevent fraud.

She's already admitted that there are more than 200,000 mismatched registrations, and given how ACORN has flooded the zone with bogus registrations across the country, there's no telling just how many of the Ohio registrations are legitimate and which ones are bogus.

It opens the door to all kinds of chicanery. Consider the situation in New Jersey. The last day to register was Tuesday. Election boards across the state are swamped and some think that they might not be able to process all the registrations in time for election day. This ordinarily isn't a problem because such individuals would be able to obtain provisional ballots.

The problem arises because you're going to get people who demand to cast ballots directly into the machines without having the verifications. They will get a judge to agree to let them vote.

Voters whose names do not appear in the books are entitled to use paper provisional ballots. The provisional ballots are counted after officials verify the voters are registered.

Voters can also go to a judge on duty in each county on Election Day to ask for an order that would allow them vote on a machine. Lawyers from the state, political parties and the American Civil Liberties Union will be on hand to help resolve disputes over whether people are registered.

In many counties, some new voters’ forms will not be processed in time to get them in the main books, but they will be included in supplemental listings. County officials will be able to confirm they are registered through these listings and allow them to vote in the booth.

I suspect that this process is similar to what happens around the country, and it opens the door to fraud and abuse.

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?