Court orders Ohio to Verify Voter Registrations, ACORN calls it Suppression

Election Law Blog has a short, useful summary. A three-judge panel from the same court ruled last week that the Democrat Secretary of State, who’s resisted GOP efforts to implement the new system, could rely on the current procedures. The full panel reversed that ruling today, which means now she’ll have to report mismatches between names on registration forms and names on DMV records to the local county elections boards. Ohio Republicans exult and lower the boom:

“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. “Once again, [SoS] Jennifer Brunner has wasted valuable taxpayer dollars only to have her partisan agenda rejected by a court of law. Her shameful actions to disenfranchise Republican absentee voters, block the transparency of early voting and refuse the proper verification of newly registered voters have rightfully damaged her credibility as a nonpartisan election administrator. She is destroying the public trust in Ohio’s elections system.”

Meanwhile, the ACORN story’s finally broken all the way through on cable news; here’s a double feature for you from tonight’s CNN and MSNBC, respectively. Note the point made by the correspondent in the latter clip (or by the Republican lawyer quoted here): It’s not really voter impersonation that’s the big worry, it’s the logistical nightmare of poll workers having to sift so many bogus registration forms that bona fide registrations can’t be processed in a timely manner. Which is a problem, but given the trend in party identification, especially among new voters, would seem to be more of a problem for Democrats than Republicans.

The goals of the people orchestrating these attacks are to distract ACORN from helping people vote and to justify massive voter suppression. That’s the real voter fraud; the noise about a small fraction of the forms ACORN has turned in is meant to get the press and public take their eyes off the real threat, while those hurling the charges are stealing people’s right to vote in broad daylight. They have already tried to prevent Ohio from registering voters at its early voting sites. In Michigan, they planned to use foreclosure notices to challenge thousands of voters. And if this year is like past years, they are preparing to use this so-called voter fraud to justify massive challenges to voters in minority precincts on Election Day.