Constitutional Law

Appeals Court Sides With Ohio Republican Party On Voter Registration

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in a ruling that reverses one it issued last week, says the Ohio Secretary of State must take additional actions to ensure that thousands of new voter registrations are not fraudulent. The Associated Press reports that the full Sixth Circuit ruled that Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner must use other state records and the Social Security database to verify hundreds of thousands of new voter registrations before Election Day. Brunner was sued by the state Republican Party, which has argued that new voter registrations are questionable or fraudulent. Brunner has countered that she has followed the mandates of the federal law, Help America Vote Act, which is aimed at stopping voter disenfranchisement. “Our goal is to protect the rights of all voters to vote and to have their votes count,” Brunner said in a statement responding to the Sixth Circuit’s ruling in Ohio Republican Party v. Brunner.

Brunner added that the federal law does not allow government databases to be improperly used to block voter registrations. The New York Times reported last week that election officials in at least six states were illegally accessing the Social Security data in checking voter registrations. In an interview with The Associated Press earlier this week, Ohio State University law school professor Dan Tokaji questioned the reality of vote fraud, saying, “There’s a lot more rhetoric than reality when it comes to actual voter fraud. There’s this public perception that voter fraud is common when the reality is that it’s quite rare.”

Full post as published by ACS Blog on October 15, 2008 (boomark / email).