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Jennifer Brunner

Ohio and Minn. Sec Of States: No Reports Of Voter Fraud

Zachary Roth | November 6, 2008, 2:39PM

Since we're rounding up the evidence (or lack thereof) of voter fraud taking place yesterday, it's worth also noting what the top election officials in Ohio and Minnesota told us on Tuesday night.

Ohio secretary of state Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, said in a statement released toTPMmuckraker the night of the election: "We have received no reports of election irregularities in Ohio today - and we have been on the lookout for any hint of illegal voting or voter suppression."

And her counterpart in Minnesota, Mark Ritchie, also a Democrat, told TPMmuckraker in an interview that his office had received no reports of voter fraud.

In both states, Republicans or their allies had raised concerns about the possibility for fraud. Brunner had reportedly received death threats after she fought a GOP lawsuit aimed at cracking down on voter fraud. The Supreme Court sided with Brunner.

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Topics: ACORN, Jennifer Brunner, Voting, voter fraud

Jennifer Brunner

Ohio Sec of State: No Reports Of Illegal Voting

Zachary Roth | November 4, 2008, 8:24PM

A statement from Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio Secretary of State:

"We have received no reports of election irregularities in Ohio today - and we have been on the lookout for any hint of illegal voting or voter suppression.

Republicans in the state had raised fears of voter fraud after the Supreme Court rejected their lawsuit against Brunner, over discrepancies in some voters' registration information.

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Topics: Jennifer Brunner, Voting, voter fraud

Voting

Security Assigned To Ohio Dem Sec of State

Zachary Roth | November 4, 2008, 7:05PM

Security has been assigned to Ohio's Democratic secretary of state Jennifer Brunner, reports the Toledo Blade.

Brunner was sued by the state Republican party over a dispute about discrepancies in the registration information of newly registered voters. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Brunner last month.

Brunner has reported receiving death threats after the ruling, and her office was the target of a security breach.

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Topics: Jennifer Brunner, Voting, voter fraud

Voting

OH GOP Preempts Election Day Results With "Placeholder" Complaints

Kate Klonick | November 4, 2008, 4:27PM

With the polls closing in just hours, the Ohio Republican party -- already thwarted in their attempts at voter suppression by the DOJ and the Supreme Court -- have continued to file complaints against Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, the Wall Street Journal blog Washington Wire reports:

Republicans also raised new concerns about the counting of provisional ballots and other voting procedures. The party wants an injunction that would require Brunner to rescind some of her voting directives.
Brunner filed a motion asking to have the case consolidated with another federal suit pending in Cleveland. In the Cleveland case, the secretary of state recently reached an agreement with the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless that county boards of election will have consistent standards for counting provisional ballots. Such ballots require additional checks and aren't counted until well after Election Day.

The WSJ quotes Edward B. Foley, director of the election-law program at the Ohio State University, who calls the Republicans' suit a "placeholder" in case the voting results in Ohio are close -- an idea echoed by a voting expert

Rick Hasen, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and an election expert, echoed this to TPMmuckraker saying it was "a way to have a foot in court" in the event that the vote is tight in Ohio and litigaiton is needed.

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Topics: Election 2008, Jennifer Brunner, Voting

Voting

GOP Voter Suppression: More Miss than Hit

Zachary Roth | October 30, 2008, 1:10PM

Yesterday we posted a quick round-up of the various voter-suppression schemes being pushed by Republicans in swing states around the country. And after looking at the list, one thing quickly becomes clear: most of the efforts have failed.

There's no one grand unifying theory for why that's true.

In some cases, the courts have rejected GOP efforts to make voting harder:

In Indiana, for instance, a Superior Court judge declined to support a GOP bid to shut down early voting centers in Democratic-leaning cities in Lake County, and the state Supreme Court chose not to immediately intervene.

In Wisconsin, a suit brought by Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen -- which he later admitted had been requested by the Republican Party -- seeking to force the state election board to re-confirm all newly registered voters was thrown out by a county court.

In Michigan, a federal appeals court today blocked the Republican secretary of state, Terri Lynn Land, from throwing 5,500 newly registered voters off the rolls because their registration cards were returned as undeliverable, after voting-rights groups sued.

In other states, Democratic state officials or voting-rights advocates have held the line:

In Nevada, Secretary of State Ross Miller denied a request from the state GOP to require voters to cast provisional ballots if they fixed mistakes in their voting information at the polls.

In Colorado, a bid by Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman -- who himself is running for a seat in the U.S. House -- to purge 14,000 voters from the rolls was only partially successful. After voting-rights groups sued, a settlement was reached yesterday allowing the voters to cast provisional ballots. According to the Rocky Mountain News, those ballots would "be presumed to be valid unless state and county officials prove otherwise." A lawyer for the voting-rights groups called the deal "a win-win."

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Topics: ACORN, Jennifer Brunner, Michael Mukasey, Voting, voter fraud

Voting

DOJ, Bucking White House, Won't Intervene in Ohio Voting Case

Zachary Roth | October 30, 2008, 9:09AM

Looks like the most high-profile of the various Republican voter-suppression schemes is faring no better than many of the others.

The New York Times reports that the Department of Justice will not require Ohio's Democratic secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner, to provide local election officials with lists of new voters who have mismatches in their registration information.

Late last week, in an unusual intervention, the White House had passed on a request by Republican House leader John Boehner that DOJ take action on the issue -- triggering outrage from voting-rights groups. But according to the Times:

The Justice Department has been in contact with Ohio election officials since early October and this week its lawyers determined they would not pursue litigation before the election, according to the sources familiar with the discussions.

The state Republican party had sued to force Brunner to hand over the information. Voting-rights advocates feared that it could allow the Republicans to launch a slew of voter challenges at the polls, and the Supreme Court rejected the GOP bid earlier this month.

Still, the Ohio Republicans are trying to make maximum political hay out of the dispute. They released a radio ad earlier this week accusing Brunner of "concealing evidence."

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Topics: Jennifer Brunner, Michael Mukasey, Voting, voter fraud

John Boehner

White House Wants DOJ Action On Ohio Voting Case

Zachary Roth | October 25, 2008, 5:23PM

Looks like the White House is having trouble getting out of the habit of using the Department of Justice for political purposes.

The Washington Post reports that President Bush has asked DOJ to look into a request by House Republican leader John Boehner that would force Ohio's Secretary of State to provide local election officials with information on 200,000 newly registered voters who have mismatched registration data. That could make it possible for Republicans to issue challenges to many of these voters, perhaps forcing them to cast provisional ballots.

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Ohio Republicans, who were seeking to force the Secretary of State, Democrat Jennifer Brunner, to provide the information on mismatches to local officials, did not have standing to bring the case.

Boehner announced yesterday in a press release that he had sent a letter earlier this week to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking him to take action, but received no response. He then turned to the White House for help -- warning in a letter to President Bush that if no action were taken, "there is a significant risk if not a certainty, that unlawful votes will be cast and counted."

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino characterized the move as "a routine step that would be taken for any such request from a congressional leader," according to the Post.

But it's worth remembering that much of the politicization of the Department of Justice that was exposed in the U.S. Attorneys scandal centered on voting issues, and specifically on an effort by the White House and DOJ to prioritize voter fraud prosecutions despite scant evidence that such fraud was occurring.

As voting rights groups point out, the mismatches at issue in this case are often nothing more than that the name on a voter's drivers license includes a middle initial, while that on his voter registration form does not.

Jon Greenbaum of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, told the Post: "This is taking the politicization of this to a new level."

We'll be watching this closely.

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Topics: George Bush, Jennifer Brunner, John Boehner, Michael Mukasey, U.S. Attorneys, Voting, voter fraud

Voting

Ohio's Voting-Rights Ruling: What's the Upshot?

Zachary Roth | October 15, 2008, 5:44PM

Initial reports seemed to suggest that last night's ruling by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on voter registration procedures in the critical swing state of Ohio could potentially disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters.

In truth, the story is more complicated than that. It's not clear how many, if any, voters will be dropped from the rolls as a result of the ruling, and the underlying legal dispute is not as cut and dry as in some of the other GOP-led voter suppression efforts we've covered.

We've seen a slew of voting-related litigation in states and counties across the nation. So it's worth taking a moment to understand how this latest development might affect voting in a state that John Kerry lost by around 118,000 votes in 2004 -- and what it says about the where the Republican's voter-suppression strategy is heading.

Ohio's Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, was being sued by the state Republican party, in what it says is an effort bring the state into compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, and state election laws.

The entire 6th Circuit reversed a three-judge appeals panel and sided with the GOP. The court held that HAVA requires Brunner to provide county elections boards with the names of newly registered voters whose voter registration forms don't match DMV records.

Over 600,000 new voters have registered in Ohio this year. But it appears from the ruling that Brunner has already identified the mismatches from that group. The ruling notes that if the Secretary of State's office found a mismatch, it would send the county board of elections a letter saying that the voters' eligibility could not be confirmed. Then, "the Secretary required unconfirmed voter records to be updated and resent to the Secretary for another effort to validate them with the [Bureau of Motor Vehicle] records." But at a certain point, for reasons that are unclear, the communication between the Secretary of State's office and the county election officials appears to have ceased.

The court's decision will require Brunner to provide local elections officials with easily accessible county-by-county lists of mismatched voters for whom there were discrepancies between the information on their registration forms and other government documents.

The court didn't spell out what the counties must do with the information on mismatches. It's illegal for election officials to unilaterally remove voters from the rolls this close to an election, but voting-rights advocates fear that the information could allow some counties to mount challenges to voters whose records don't match up, even if the mismatch is the result of nothing more than a typographical error, and force them to cast a provisional ballot -- "disenfranchised by a typo," as Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center, a voting-rights activist group, puts it.

But it appears unlikely that large numbers of challenges will result from the ruling. The Ohio Secretary of State has the power to set a uniform standard for what counties should do when confronted with a mismatch, according to Carrie Davis, a lawyer with the ACLU. And Brunner -- like officials in 46 other states, say experts -- has consistently said that a simple mismatch is not grounds for knocking voters off the rolls.

Could some GOP county election officials try to ignore that directive, and impose a harsher standard? Possibly, but every challenge would be voted on by the board, made up of two Republicans and two Democrats. Brunner herself would cast the tie-breaking vote.

So at this point, it's far from clear how many eligible voters will be removed from the rolls thanks to the court's decision last night.

Part of the concern among voting-rights advocates has to do with the timing of the decision. They say that, with only three weeks until election day, there's little time for election officials to clear up the mismatches, creating potential confusion and delays on election day if, in the end, significant numbers of voters are challenged. In addition, the court makes clear that any voter registered in the last year -- over 600,000 -- must be verified.

By contrast, in Florida, where courts ruled earlier this year that a similar "no-match, no vote" standard can obtain, it applied only to voters registered in the last few months. And because the court made its ruling earlier in the cycle, there's been more time for election officials to sort out discrepancies.

Still, in a sense, this is really the result of an earlier legislative win for the GOP. Thanks largely to the efforts of congressional Republican "vote-fraud" hawks like Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Kit Bond, HAVA, the sweeping federal voting law enacted in the wake of the Florida 2000 fiasco, imposed a more restrictive standard in terms of verifying new voters' information. Arguing in the courts for that law to be strictly upheld is hardly an underhanded strategy, even if there are good arguments for a more liberal interpretation of the law.

So the GOP's voter suppression efforts have simply become more sophisticated. Instead of -- or really, in addition to -- ground-level efforts to use misinformation to intimidate and confuse voters at the polls -- they've gotten the courts to uphold a newly restrictive standard on verifying voters' eligibility.

Or, put more simply: Republican voter suppression has gone legit.