Understanding the GOP Assault on Voter Registration

With only three and a half weeks to go before the election and McCain sinking in the polls, it is hard to understand why the GOP is so dogged in pursuing its desperate and apparently hopeless strategy of whipping up a frenzy over the chimera of systemic voter fraud. Zach Roth at Talking Points Memo puts his finger on the reason in a post about McCain's obsession with the relatively small number of fake voter registrations collected by paid canvassers for ACORN:

[B]y shrieking about voter fraud, the McCain camp hopes to make voting officials more willing to place restrictions in the path of voters on election day, potentially causing delays and confusion at the polls, and reducing overall turnout. And it seeks to discredit any Obama victory by raising the suggestion that it was aided by the votes of ineligible voters.

Ah, that's it. The GOP knows that it is not likely to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat through these tactics, but that isn't their only interest here. What they also desire is to de-legitimize an Obama victory by keeping the margin of victory down and portraying the result as perpetrated by fraud. In other words, they want at least the appearance of the illegitimacy of Bush's tainted victory in 2000.

How is the strategy playing out in Ohio? The GOP obtained a court order from Reagan-appointed U.S. District Judge George C. Smith that Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner must do what she is already doing: performing checks of voter registrations using state databases and, as a backup, federal social security records. The Republicans merely seized on a poorly-written passage in an election manual to allege that the legally required checks are not occurring. In fact, they are proceeding at such a pace that the head of the U.S. Social Security Administration has sent a letter to Brunner questioning the high number of mismatches flagged by her office.

The GOP lawsuit goes further, however, seeking to have voter information from mismatched registrations turned over to them by October 12th, giving the Republicans an opportunity to sew confusion and delay on election day by challenging thousands of voters at polling places. In addition, the GOP wants an order that all voters for whom database mismatches occur must vote by provisional ballot, even though many such mismatches result from completely innocent mistakes like data entry errors, transposition of first and last names, and the use of middle names and nicknames.

In addition to the GOP lawsuit, local Republican officials in Greene County are pushing the voter intimidation agenda by requesting voter registration records for all of the people who engaged in same-day registration and early voting during the overlap period of September 30th to October 6th, most of them college students. The county prosecutor behind the records request is a former law partner of former U.S. Senator Mike DeWine, now the chairman of John McCain's campaign in Ohio. This partisan action has no legitimate law enforcement purpose, since the names, telephone numbers, and social security numbers of records provided will be blacked out. [UPDATE: Apparently the GOP officials have requested that the records be unredacted, but in the absence of a court order that is not what they will get.] However, the widely-publicized interjection of law enforcement into the voting process will have a chilling effect on voter participation, feeding directly into the widespread disinformation that people appearing at polling places risk arrest for outstanding traffic tickets, unpaid debts, or other legal entanglements.

In a Republican campaign that increasingly looks like a losing cause, this is the new battleground: demonizing the Democratic president, and de-legitimizing his election to the office by narrowing his margin of victory and generating confusion and doubt about the electoral process.

UPDATE: Brunner's statement in response to the GOP lawsuit, detailing her compliance with database matching requirements under federal law, is reprinted after the break.
STATEMENT FROM OHIO SECRETARY OF STATE JENNIFER BRUNNER IN RESPONSE TO THE LATEST PARTISAN LAWSUIT

"Due to an unfortunate word choice in a technical manual, partisans have filed a lawsuit without simply picking up the phone and asking us if their assumptions were true. This is just another frivolous partisan lawsuit based, this time, on bad grammar in a manual – and as far as I know, that's not a federal offense.

"Here are the facts. Ohio's statewide voter registration database meets or exceeds state and federal standards. Every Ohio voter registration is processed and verified with a multilayer system that protects voter's rights and prevents voter fraud. That matching process with Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicle and Social Security Administration data has been on and working throughout this crucial election year. If a mismatch occurs, it is flagged in our statewide voter registration database so local boards can access the information in a secure, efficient manner.

"We have faith in the bipartisan elections officials who have worked under the same time constraints for processing voter registrations for a very long time."

FACTS ABOUT VOTER REGISTRATION IN OHIO:

Ohio's Statewide Voter Registration Database is accessible for all boards of elections through a state-of-the-art secured connection. The database provides information with plenty of time to act and is part of a multi-layer set of protections against any potential fraud.

-- When an Ohioan registers to vote, local elections officials enter that registration into their local database.

-- Software for many local boards notifies the official if the address entered doesn't exist in the county, allowing an immediate confirmation process to begin.

-- The local officials forward the registrations to a statewide voter registration database.

-- At the same time, the local board produces a nonforwardable acknowledgement notice for the new registrant. If the acknowledgement comes back as "undeliverable", the BOE is required to investigate and undertake a confirmation process.

-- The statewide database conducts a near-instantaneous match for 13 data points with the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles, a process that has been turned on this entire year. Data points checked include Ohio driver's license number, name, address, and Social Security number (through an agreement with the Social Security Administration).

-- Any mismatches are flagged in the Statewide Voter Registration Database for local elections officials to investigate.

WHAT THE SECRETARY OF STATE HAS DONE:

-- Performed training for county officials regionally and at the annual Summer Conference of Election Officials on the voter registration process.

-- Hired a staff person whose sole responsibility is the database.

-- This staff person ensures monthly reports are sent to counties. Through his efforts and that of the Elections Division and the counties, the numbers of duplicates and errors has declined.

-- Introduced a query system to counties to be able to securely look up voter records and has incorporated additional search fields.

-- Held numerous meetings with counties and vendors on the issue of the county and statewide database system.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SECRETARY OF STATE'S COURT FILING:

-- Had the Plaintiff [ORP] simply made the inquiry of the Defendant about the central tenet of its "renewed" motion, that the Ohio Secretary of State has failed to comply with relevant provisions of HAVA relating to its SWVRD, it would have avoided involving this Court in what is a groundless motion designed, in its very conception, to create doubt in the minds of voters about the fairness of Ohio's election by conjuring the specter of non-existent voter fraud.

-- Ohio is fully HAVA–compliant. In order to suggest otherwise, plaintiffs both misstate the requirements of HAVA and mischaracterize statements made by the Secretary of State.

-- Plaintiffs' latest TRO application is all smoke and no fire. The "evidence" that the Secretary is violating HAVA consists entirely of statements taken out of context, coupled with some affidavit testimony from witnesses who have no first hand knowledge of the situation.

-- Plaintiff needed only to have inquired of the Secretary of State as to what actually occurs, rather than to tax the time of this Court on a quixotic venture to poke holes in counties' poll lists and force excessive and unwarranted slowdowns at the polls on Election Day in favor provisional balloting for both Election Day and absentee voting

-- Paragraph 5 of the Motion is devoted to a hypothetical, designed to strike terror into the hearts of readers concerned about vote dilution by bogus votes, in which someone sneaks across the Ohio border, registers with a fake Social Security number, and immediately receives a ballot, with no possibility of detection. The hypothetical is legally and factually flawed.