The White House pushed back asking the Department of Justice to investigate 200,000 Ohio voters. Courts set back GOP voter suits

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A Republican legal campaign questioning the legitimacy of many newly registered voters hit a wall this week when courts rejected several cases filed by GOP state parties and officials.

As Democrats registered record numbers of new voters over the recent months, Republicans asked courts to enforce a law intended to prevent fraud, but that voting rights advocates feared could erroneously purge thousands of legitimate voters from the rolls.


But over the last week, several judges ruled against or threw out Republican-filed challenges in battleground states.

Republicans hit back on Friday, when the White House asked the Department of Justice to investigate 200,000 Ohio voters with questionable registrations.

The battles are over a section of the Help American Vote Act, passed in 2002 by Congress to prevent another Florida-style recount. HAVA requires states to match information supplied on voter registration forms with department of motor vehicles and Social Security records.

Individuals who provide information that does not match those documents may face confusion at the polls or be required to vote on a provisional ballot.

But critics of the provision say inaccurate state databases lead to erroneous disqualifications. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law found that the matching process fails 20 percent to 30 percent of the time due to minor errors like database typos, use of nicknames, and multiple entries.

“The general narrative of what’s going on with a lot of these cases is to attempt to limit the voters to who are participating,” said Georgetown law professor Jonah Goldman, director of the nonpartisan National Campaign for Fair Elections. “The central premise is that more voters help Democrats.”

Republicans, however, say that the databases are a way to increase security at the polls and stop illegal registrations from becoming fraudulent voters.

“Make no mistake, HAVA disenfranchises no one and protects the right to vote,” said Wisconsin Republican State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, state chairman of McCain’s campaign. “HAVA checks are an important safeguard — one mandated by Congress and state law — to help make sure those lawful votes are not diluted by unlawful votes.”

This year, McCain’s campaign has waged war against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN, a grass-roots low-income advocacy group that’s under investigation for possible voter registration fraud.

At the beginning of October, ACORN reported that it registered 1.3 million new voters. But further investigation found that 30 percent — roughly 400,000 registrations — were faulty in some way, either registered under fake names such Mickey Mouse, were duplicates or were incomplete. Republicans jumped on the findings, arguing that the group was proof of a systemic voter fraud campaign by the left.

In the last presidential debate, McCain said the group was on “the verge of maybe perpetrating the greatest fraud in voter history, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

The Obama campaign struck back, with campaign lawyer Bob Bauer asking Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint Special Prosecutor Nora Dannehy to investigate the “systematic development and dissemination of unsupported, spurious allegations of voter fraud” by the McCain campaign, the Republican National Committee, and also any possible involvement by the Justice Department and White House officials.

But faulty registrations rarely turn into illegal votes. While ACORN has admitted to errors in its registration process, documented cases of illegally cast ballots remain rare. A five-year investigation by the Bush administration resulted in the convictions of only 26 voters found guilty of voting more than once, registration fraud, or ineligible voting.

“This is not a plan that was hatched yesterday,” said Daniel Tokaji, an election law specialist at Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. “The Republican party is using the whole ACORN rap as a justification for the stringent ballot security measures they are urging.”

Over the past week, courts threw out several cases challenging the implementation of the match requirements.

On Wednesday, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner told county boards of elections that they could not challenge voters on Election Day or reject absentee ballots based solely on a mismatch with the state databases.

The Ohio Republican party had sued Brunner, a Democrat, to force her to provide county election boards with the names of nearly 200,000 newly registered voters whose information did not match state databases. Last week, the Supreme Court found that the party had no right to sue, effectively backing Brunner's position.

A few hours after the decision, Republican fundraiser David Myhal filed nearly the same suit in state court.

Van Hollen filed a similar suit in Wisconsin, asking a state judge to force the bipartisan board of elections to retroactively check the information of everyone who registered to vote from January 2006 to August 2008.

Wisconsin election officials admit that their database incorrectly flags voters at least 20 percent of the time. When the six members of the state elections board, all retired judges, ran their own registrations through the system, four were incorrectly rejected.

Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi threw out the case on Thursday, ruling that Van Hollen had no standing to sue under either federal or state law. The Wisconsin Department of Justice plans to appeal the ruling.

And in Indiana, the chairman of the county Republican Central Committee and a member of the county Board of Elections sued to shut down three early-voting centers in Democratic stronghold Lake County that were not unanimously approved by the board. They argued that in-person absentee voting could contribute to voter fraud.

On Wednesday, a Lake county superior court judge ordered the sites to remain open. The Republican party appealed the ruling, which is set to go before the state court of appeals next Thursday.

In Montana, a state GOP official challenged nearly 6,000 voters living in Democratic strongholds who filed change of address forms with the U.S. Postal Service. Registrations must contain current addresses. After the Montana Democratic Party filed a federal lawsuit challenging the request, the state party backed down.

In Michigan, the Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign sued the Michigan and Macomb County Republican parties after learning of an alleged Republican plan to use foreclosure filings to keep some residents who've failed to update their address from voting. The suit settled last week and the information will not be used.

At least one case, in Georgia, is still outstanding. On Wednesday, civil rights lawyers and state attorneys were unable to reach a compromise over the state’s matching program after Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel, a Republican, made nearly 2 million requests to Social Security to verify voter identities, far more than have been made in any other state. A coalition of voting rights group called the checks a “systematic purging” and sued to halt the use of the database matching program.

Democrats have suffered on notable loss, in Florida, where The Brennan Center and other voting rights advocates had challenged the state requirement that the driver's license or Social Security number on a registration form must be verified for a voter to register. They lost in federal court and Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning began enforcing the law in early September.

Since then, the state has rejected almost 9,000 new registrations, according to state records. Democrats were four times more likely to be caught by the law and minorities accounted for more than half of the rejected voters.

“I’m hoping one candidate or another is so far ahead that we don’t care,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School. “But we are going to be in deep trouble if we have a razor thin election and have to turn to provisional ballots.”