The following post was written as a guest post for us by District 11 State Senator Teresa Fedor:
After months of partisan lawsuits and years of nasty attacks on Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio Republican Party has finally tipped their hand. Ohio Republicans are trying to destroy our election system just to win an election.
In fact, the Ohio Republican Party has declared war on Ohio’s bipartisan voting processes.
The latest assault involves a statewide voter registration database that has been used in every election since the 2006 general. Secretary Brunner has rightly said that the database was never intended to be used as a litmus test for voter eligibility. While there are errors in the database – just as there are in any file of 8.2 million people – our bipartisan elections officials have always used other tools to make sure voter registration fraud is identified and illegal voting is stopped.
So, what’s the big deal? After all, can’t boards just snap their fingers and fix all these errors if Secretary Brunner just gives them a list?
That isn’t the point. Never has been.
The Republican goal isn’t to clean up a database. If it was, they wouldn’t limit their lawsuits to just those people who registered this year – and are overwhelmingly pro-Obama. They would worry about errors with Joe the Plumber and House Speaker Jon Husted.
No, the Republican plan is to demand that boards of elections do something everyone knows they can’t, then force 200,000 new registrants to use provisional ballots on Election Day.
The goal is chaos. Force new voters to fight for their right to vote. Make the lines longer. Tie up poll workers with hundreds of thousands of unnecessary provisional ballots. And hope that lower income Ohioans will leave before they get to vote. Once the polls are closed and the voters go home, the Ohio Republican Party and their team of lawyers can pick off those provisional votes one by one.
Fortunately, the US Supreme Court ruled against the Ohio Republican Party. But they are already scrambling to find another way to winnow the voter rolls, limit eligible voters, and carry Ohio for McCain.
One avenue is a suit filed by a Republican fundraiser before the Ohio Supreme Court that he helped elect. The Republicans want boards of elections to disqualify absentee ballots if there is a database error – but only if the person registered this year. It’s a blatant violation of equal protection under the US Constitution.
The other avenue is a witch-hunt by Hamilton County Prosecutor and McCain co-chair Joe Deters. He wants to drag 40% of Hamilton County early voters before a grand jury. Even the Republican chair of the local board of elections admits he hasn’t heard a single allegation of fraud regarding these voters, who are overwhelmingly young and African-American.
I agree with Democratic Chairman Chris Redfern that enough is enough. It’s time for all of us – Republicans, Democrats and Independents – to support Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner in her efforts to prepare for a successful November election.
And it’s way past time for the Ohio Republican Party to stop attacking our bipartisan elections system just to win a single election.
