Say Anything Blog

The law only requires that such checks be possible.

It is impossible to cross-check nearly 700,000 new or revised voter registrations filed this year without crashing Ohio’s registration system, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said Thursday. She added that the entire system will have to be rebuilt after next week’s election so that fraud can be more easily detected.

Brunner said she discovered the system was too fragile to double-check the names, which her staff began trying to do earlier this month after the Ohio Republican Party sued the Democratic secretary to force her to check the registrations. At the time, even as she fought the lawsuit and eventually won at the U.S. Supreme Court, Brunner said she was making an effort to cross-check the registrations against state driver’s license and federal social security records.

“I spoke too soon,” Brunner said during a press briefing on election day procedures for Ohio, again expected to be a closely watched state in the presidential election.

Earlier this month, Brunner told The Plain Dealer that a cursory review by her staff had found about 200,000 discrepancies in the newly filed or revised registrations since Jan. 1. That does not mean each was a case of fraud, but could mean someone incorrectly jotted down a driver’s license or Social Security digit on the applications.

But the Ohio Republican Party suggested that some of those cases could amount to voter fraud and that Brunner, as the state’s top elections officer, was obligated to double-check the information. Brunner argued that federal rules only require the state to have a system in place for double-checking registrations but do not require her to make the checks.

That’s not exactly a winning argument, to my mind.  Why should the taxpayers foot the bill for the resources that allow the detection of voter registration fraud if election officials have no intention of using them?  Heck, if we’re going to let the voter registration rolls fill up with fraudulent registrations, why are the taxpayers funding voter registration in the first place?

Oh, and by the way, Brunner has extensive connections to both ACORN and the Obama campaign.