Brunner: Vote Law "Institutionalized" Vote Caging

An article published yesterday by McClatchy Newspapers' Washington Bureau says that new voting laws in Ohio and Florida could dampen Democratic voting in 2008, and the part about Ohio contains a hair-raising warning from Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (D).

The article starts with this description of the overall problem:

Backers of the new laws say they're aimed at curbing vote fraud. But the statutes also could facilitate a controversial Republican tactic known as "vote caging," which the GOP tried in Ohio and Florida in 2004 before public disclosures foiled the efforts, said Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief in the Bush administration who's now with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

Caging, used in the past to target poor minorities in heavily Democratic precincts, entails sending mass mailings to certain voters and then using the undelivered letters to compile lists of voters for eligibility challenges.

Later it gets into the comments by Brunner:

In Ohio, which swung the 2004 election to Bush, new Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said in a phone interview that an election law passed last year and signed by former Republican Gov. Bob Taft effectively "institutionalized" vote caging.

The law requires that the state's 88 county election boards send non-forwardable, pre-election notices to all 7.8 million registered Ohio voters at least 60 days before the election.

Undelivered letters are public record, she said, meaning that effectively, "now the counties are paying for" the data needed to compile challenge lists.

In addition, Brunner said, the law toughened voter ID requirements and "took away rights of some voters to be heard about whether or not their registration was valid."

In the past, Ohio voters were entitled to an official notice and a hearing before an election board could declare them ineligible, but the new law says the board can make that decision without notice. A disqualified voter who shows up at the polls must demonstrate that he's fixed any eligibility problem or opt for filing a provisional ballot that may not count.

Brunner said the new law has left her feeling "like being in a sword fight with one hand behind your back."

She said she's sought, "while working within the framework of preventing fraud," to make it "as easy as possible for people who are eligible to participate."

Just having a Democratic Secretary of State isn't going to prevent GOP attempts at voter suppression, not when she's constrained by an election law that helps them out.