A number of developments in quick succession out of Ohio regarding Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (D-OH) and the questionable registration forms arising from her questionable early-voting program:
- After saying initially that she would not appeal the Sixth Circuit’s upholding of the District Court’s temporary restraining order demanding that she allow tighter oversight of the program before continuing it, she has swept into the U.S. Supreme Court alleging a “veiled attempt at disenfranchising voters” (not quite clear if she’s talking about the Appeals Court).
- The number of suspect forms Brunner is protecting is now known: She’s sitting on a whopping 200,000 forms that warrant investigation. Brunner is refusing to allow county boards of elections to match registration forms against state resources such as state motor vehicle and Social Security databases. As Ace of Spades mentions (Ace has been awesome covering this, by the way), Bush’s margin of victory in Ohio four years ago was 118,457 votes.
- It is already known that Obama activists from out-of-state, falsely registered as Ohio residents, have indeed received absentee ballots, as part of a larger effort to get thousands of others registered and furnished with similar ballots. One of Sec. Brunner’s most frequent refrains (echoed constantly by ACORN) is that there is no evidence that fake registrations translate directly to fake ballots cast.
Sec. Brunner has asked Associate Justice John Paul Stevens to take her appeal. He may decide it himself; he may take it to the full Court; he may decline to hear the appeal altogether (in which case Brunner could see if she can persuade another Justice to take her appeal. Or she can just see if she can run out the clock while she continues to deny the county boards permission to access state databases to screen out at least some of the 200,000 registration forms she sitting on, while absentee ballots continue to go out. Anyone taking odds?
