More than 200,000 registered Ohio voters may be blocked from casting regular ballots on Election Day because of a federal appeals court decision on Tuesday requiring the disclosure of lists of voters whose names did not match those on government databases, state election officials and voting experts said.
The court decision requires Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio secretary of state, to provide the names to local election officials by Friday. Once the local officials have the names, they may require these voters to cast provisional ballots rather than regular ones, and they may ask partisan poll workers to challenge these voters on Election Day. Both possibilities could cause widespread problems when the voters show up at the polls.
This crap always takes place in a crucial swing state where poll numbers are usually tight.
Social Security data indicate that Ohio election officials found more than 200,000 names that did not match this year; state election officials say their analysis of the data indicates that most of these are individual voters, not duplicate registrations. But Ms. Brunner said that problems with the databases could very well be why the names did not match.
“Federal government red tape, misstated technical information or glitches in databases should not be the basis for voters having to cast provisional ballots,” said Ms. Brunner, adding that she plans to require that notifications are sent to all voters whose records have discrepancies.
The Ohio Republican chairman, Robert T. Bennett, called the court ruling “a victory for the integrity of Ohio’s election.”
Of course he would call it a "victory" because even 10% of those 200,000 voters having their ballots discarded would probably swing the state into the McCain/Palin column.
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