Ohio Republicans appear to have won a major court “victory” that could throw this year’s election into chaos. A Federal Appeals Court in Cincinnatti ruled 9 to 6 that the Secretary of State must provide detailed localized lists of newly registered voters whose Motor Vehicle IDs and/or Social Security numbers provided for voter ID don’t match centralized lists. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner estimates that at least 200,000 of the 666,000 voters registered this year would fall in this category.
Newspapers in Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnatti and Akron reported this matter of factly, largely relying on the AP feed. Brunner felt that the decision was too late, relied on an incorrect reading of the Federal HAVA (Help America Vote Act) law, and planned to appeal the ruling to the US Supreme Court.
It is totally clear that much of the same obstructionist policy implemented by Ohio Republicans under Ken Blackwekk would return in 2008. More Republican challenges. Hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots. :ong lines and lots of problems in Democratic districts. Easy times and no challenges in predominantly Republican districts.
These votes are primarily Democratic and many were triggered by the high intensity Ohio primary. Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) said that it had 100,000 new voters with 34,000 coming after the primary and the rest coming earlier.
CNN reported that many of these voters participated in the heated Ohio primary. That would tend to make those results at least suspect. CNN suggested in its broadcasts that the fairest result would be to clean this up after the 2008 elections are held.
Is this a local strategy or part of a broadly applied end game by national Republicans that would depress turnout, snarl the elections, save many legislative seats (or at least some). How far will it go? Ohio? PA? NJ? NV? A dozen “battleground states? A full court press in all 50 states?