Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Federal Court of Appeals: Invalid Voter Registrations in Ohio Must be Found and Removed

The AP reports that a federal court of appeals has ruled that the state of Ohio must verify the eligibility of voters. This is in direct contrast to the wishes of Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.
A federal appeals court ordered Ohio's top elections official to set up a system by Friday to verify the eligibility of newly registered voters and make the information available to the state's 88 county election boards.

The full 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati on Tuesday upheld a lower court ruling that Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner must use other government records to check thousands of new voters for registration fraud.

A three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit had disagreed last week. The full court's ruling, in which nine of 16 judges concurred, overturns that decision.
This is good news after some bad. The circuit court panel having sided with Brunner was worrisome. Thankfully it seems the correct decision was made in the end. The blunt analysis at the Hedgehog Report:
Here’s a thumbnail view of the law, what happened and what will happen. The federal law is that while voter registration laws are eased and people have all sorts of places to register and the federal government will provide loads of money for registration efforts and equipment for voting there is one proviso. States must verify new registrations against either a National data base or state data bases to verify someone exists. Ohio, under the democrat secretary of state, took a simple approach and that was “we are too incompetent to do this”. (the quotes are mine and for that matter so is the quote, but that’s the qist of what she said). Frankly she choose not to do it and then claimed she did not have time to do this close to the election.

Well the Court of appeals ruled otherwise and now before registration cards or mailed out or voters are allowed to vote new voters must be matched against the state or federal data base. Frankly not carrying out a law is like an impeachable offense in my opinion.
While I'm happy this is the outcome, consider that we, as a nation, are even having this discussion. In what reality is purposely allowing thousands of fraudulent votes decide the next President fair and equitable?

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