voting fraud

October 25, 2008April 18, 2020

Ohio GOP still trying to disrupt elections

The Ohio GOP continues to fight Secretary of State Brunner to force her to produce a list of registrations that failed to match data on state and federal databases the state is required to check as part of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). It now has had House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) send a letter to President Bush to ask the Department of Justice to intervene in the case.

The Republicans contend that the state must give the list of registration mismatches to local election boards so that challenges can be made on election day. Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio Secretary of State, contends that HAVA gives no guidance on what to do about mismatches. She also contends that even if the data isn’t a 100% match, it can’t be used to keep someone from voting.

The type of mismatches included missing middle names, someone failed to put in a change of address so the address doesn’t match, their name is misspelled or the different databases hold different information. None of issues would prevent that person from voting – that is even with the data mismatch the voter was eligible to vote.

State Republicans believe these mismatches should be used to keep that person from voting – that the person isn’t eligible to vote. They filed a lawsuit to force Brunner to turn over the mismatches to the local boards. Through appeals, the case was sent to the US Supreme Court. The court didn’t rule on the merits of the case (who was correct) only that private groups couldn’t sue for enforcement of HAVA. So now the GOP wants the Department of Justice involved.

They claim Brunner is attempting to hide voter fraud but the real point is to force those voters to fill out provisional ballots.

In 2006, nationwide, only 60% of provisional ballots were counted. In Ohio, where the poll numbers show a close race for President, keeping 20% of questionable voters from having their votes counted would affect the outcome of the overall vote in the state. In fact the GOP only need to suppress 5 to 6 percent. After they get those voters to cast provisional ballots then they can fight how they are counted.

Late last week Secretary Brunner issued a directive on how to handle and count provisional ballots for this election so hopefully the GOP efforts, if successfully, won’t keep large numbers of people from having their vote counted. Currently there are 200,000 registrations that have mismatched data out of 600,000 new registrations.

The other point of their efforts is to cast a bad light on the election if their candidate loses. They can claim the election was “stolen”.

Another side issue is the efforts of some extremists – either Republicans or sympathetic to Republicans – have now taken to trying to hack the state election website and to mail in or call in death threats to Secretary Brunner. In fact one man has been arrested so far for making threats.

But this is a classic operation from the right – intimidations, threats, and loud protests – used to get their way. It all reminds me of efforts in fascist 3rd world countries where voters are threatened of killed for exercising their duty. The Republicans can’t just let the normal civil court actions take place they have to cause trouble.

Real sad.

Side Note

Election Law Blog has more information on this issue and others around the country.

October 15, 2008April 18, 2020

GOP’s vote fraud scam gets juicer

Yesterday were two big developments in the Republican attempts to suppress the 2008 vote. A federal court ordered the Ohio Secretary of State to turn over potentially bad registrations to the county boards of election and a Republican think tank is suing ACORN for racketeering.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered Ohio’s top elections official to set up a system by Friday to verify the eligibility of new voters and make the information available to the state’s 88 county election boards.
Last week, a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit had sided with Brunner, but after hearing an appeal the full panel sided with the GOP and U.S. District Judge George C. Smith in Columbus. Smith had ordered Brunner to develop a way to verify voter registration information and make it available to local election boards.
Brunner argued that it would take two to three days to create the necessary computer programs, and said nothing in the federal Help America Vote Act required her to do what the district court ordered.
Tuesday’s order directs Brunner to verify new registrations by comparing that information with data from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles or the Social Security Administration.
Ohio Republican Chairman Bob Bennett accused Brunner of pursuing a partisan agenda and said “her delay in providing this matching system leaves little time for election officials to act on questionable registrations.”
Federal court: Ohio must check voter registrations

The key here is the Ohio GOP talking about “questionable” registrations.

You can see their plan of attack coming a mile away. They get hold of the list of questionable registrations and challenge each one. It doesn’t matter how many are actually messed up since they are just doing a mass dump and seeing what comes up. The challenged voter then has to appear in person for a hearing and prove their info on the form is correct. If they can’t or don’t show up then they can’t vote.

The suspect voter can also be forced to cast a “Provisional ballot” which is then counted or not depending if the voter’s eligibility is confirmed. That is done in the same way as a challenge before the election. The person in question would have to show at a hearing in person or the vote isn’t counted. If it is even counted.

In 2004, provisional ballots were used to prevent hundred of thousands of votes from counting.

Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only by the whimsy and rules of a state’s top elections official; and in Ohio, that gives a virtually ballot veto to Bush-Cheney campaign co-chair, Blackwell.
Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large proportion of provisional ballots won’t be counted. For the first time in memory, the Secretary of State has banned counting ballots cast in the “wrong” precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same President.
Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class ballots. The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3% of the electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on election day.
Kerry Won Ohio: Just Count The Ballots at The Back of The Bus

The only good news on this part is since the SOS is a Democrat, provisional ballots are more likely to be counted. Still it is a legally easy and cheap way to cage voters.

The other “news” concerned a Republican think tank suing ACORN as if it were an organized crime group:

COLUMBUS — A conservative think tank in Columbus has sued the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, over voter registration.
The Buckeye Institute alleges that ACORN engages in a pattern of corrupt activity that amounts to organized crime.
The lawsuit filed today in Warren County Common Pleas Court uses a civil provision in the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly referred to as RICO.
The suit seeks the dissolution of ACORN, which has been accused of registering potential voters multiple times in Ohio and other states.
A message seeking comment from a spokesman for ACORN was not immediately returned.
The RICO statute most commonly is used to prosecute alleged members of organized crime.
Buckeye Institute sues ACORN under racketeering law

The Buckeye Institute includes the former Secretary of State Ken Blackwell – ironic isn’t it. The suit is another attempt to call into question “false” voter registrations, The GOP falsely equates false registrations with illegal voting. The suit also ignores the fact that ACORN is required to turn in all forms it receives even ones they know are false.

I don’t know too many crime groups who would knowingly incriminate itself by following the law. I mean if they are in fact trying to “deprive voters of the right to participate in an honest and effective elections process….. fraudulent voter registrations submitted by ACORN dilute the votes of legally registered voters” why would they provide the evidence of their “crime” to authorities.

It seems to me that federal law is forcing ACORN to commit the “crime” that the Buckeye Institute is accusing them of doing.

How is ACORN responsible for that?

Again false voter registrations don’t equal illegal votes and except in isolated cases, no illegal votes have occurred from a false registration.

October 11, 2008April 18, 2020

The cry of voting fraud is a fraud

The past week or so the Republican National Committee and other state Republican parties have been complaining about possible voting fraud by the group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). They have also tried to link Democrats and Obama to ACORN as if to say they are perpetrating voting fraud.

The GOP believe that since ACORN pays people to collect registrations and some of these have been faked, that actual votes are or will be cast illegally. They seem to forget that states check each and every new registration against state and federal records.

As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo writes:

The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of ‘voter fraud’ are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout.
This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won’t count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there’s very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud.
Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.
The Gist of the ACORN Story

There is a significant effort in Ohio, by the GOP, to suppress the vote. They filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of State claiming that registrations weren’t being checked. The suit came 2 days after the state got a nasty letter from the Social Security Administration complaining that Ohio was making too many checks of social security numbers. The SOS was ordered to provide a list of new registrations to county boards of elections – which already have access to them through the State Board of Elections computer system. The Secretary of State plans to appeal the ruling.

Ohio Republican Deputy Chairman Kevin DeWine said the ruling spoke volumes about Brunner, a Democrat.
“Her refusal to comply with federal law raises serious concerns about her ability to objectively oversee this election. It’s especially troubling in light of her connection to ACORN and that group’s stunning confession this week of fraudulent registration activity happening right here in Ohio,” DeWine said.
An ACORN representative is on a Brunner advisory committee, while Republicans say Obama has “strong ties” to ACORN, serving in the past as an attorney and “leadership trainer” for the group.
Within three hours of the ruling, DeWine sent out a GOP fundraising appeal, saying, “Please contribute today and help us fight the legal effort by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and her Democrat allies to let voter fraud go unchecked.”
Brunner loses lawsuit to GOP

The reason the GOP wanted the lists released was so they can use them for frivolous challenges to suppress votes that would affect Democratic votes. The GOP also had people writing down licence plate numbers during early voting at Columbus’ Vets Memorial.

They want to create distrust of the vote.

Again, registration isn’t the same as casting a ballot. Back in 2004 there was ONE case in Franklin county of someone voting more than once and it was an elderly couple who forgot they mailed in an absentee ballot and then voted on election day. They were caught and their extra vote was discarded and they had to have a visit with a judge.

In 99% of the cases ACORN catches bad registrations but by law they are forced to turn in all forms they get. When they do they flag the suspious ones for authorities and they help in any legal actions against their workers.

Franklin County had problems with ACORN in 2004 after authorities discovered dozens of voter registration forms with fake names or false information. A part-time worker for the group was indicted on charges he forged a registration form.
So far this year, officials said they have had 11 challenges to new voter registrations, and about half had been submitted by ACORN. Elections Director Michael Stinziano and Deputy Director Matthew Damschroder said it’s impossible to know how many bad registration cards might get through.
But Damschroder, a Republican, said ACORN has been “markedly better” in the county since 2004, and there’s no evidence of anyone casting a ballot using a fraudulent registration.

I am more worried about GOP voting suppression efforts than I am about false registrations.