Division I regional track finals
Fenwick graduation 2012
Ponitz graduation 2012
Home > Blogs > Ohio politics > Archives > 2008 > October > 18
Saturday, October 18, 2008
“Mismatch” legal battle moves to Ohio Supreme Court
Just hours after the Ohio Republican Party lost in the U.S. Supreme Court, the battle over mismatched voter registrations has moved to the all-Republican Ohio Supreme Court in Columbus.
A lawsuit filed on Friday, Oct. 17, against Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (pictured) asks the Ohio court to tell Brunner to tell county boards of elections not to process or count absentee ballots cast by voters registered after Jan. 1 before reviewing them for mismatches.
The lawsuit was filed by David Myhal of New Albany, a Columbus suburb. Myhal is a registered Republican in Franklin County and one of his attorneys is William Todd of Columbus who has close ties to the Republican party. The Ohio Republican Party is not an official party to the lawsuit, however.
The new lawsuit deals only with absentee ballots; the U.S. Supreme Court suit included an estimated 200,000 mismatches among nearly 666,000 voters registered since Jan. 1.
The issue is of the “utmost urgency,” the lawsuit says. That’s because Brunner allows county boards to begin removing absentee ballots from their envelopes as early as Oct. 25 and once an absentee ballot is removed from the envelope, its origin is untraceable, the lawsuit says.
Jeff Ortega, spokesman for Brunner, responded to the lawsuit:
“The nation’s highest court has sided with Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. It’s time for the Ohio Republican Party to stop injecting chaos and confusion into our excellent bipartisan election system.”
The new lawsuit seems more significant than the one before the U.S. Supreme Court, said Edward “Ned” Foley, an election law expert at the Ohio State University law school, because of the requirement that the counties not begin the counting process without using the “mismatch” information.
The new lawsuit was filed late Friday. Earlier Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out an order from a lower federal court directing Brunner to provide county boards of elections with details of how personal information on new voter registration forms doesn’t match information on drivers’ licenses or Social Security records.
The U.S. Supreme Court said the Ohio GOP likely would not prevail on the underlying question of whether the lower federal court was authorized to act on a lawsuit brought by a private entity- the state GOP - as opposed to a governmental entity.
Since Myhal is suing in state court, not federal court, the private plaintiff/government plainiff distinction that the U.S. Supreme Court relied on in throwing out the order does not apply, said Foley.
Brunner has said that an estimated 200,000 of the nearly 666,000 voter registration forms filed since Jan. 1 have mismatched information but that much of it is due to clerical errors. Her office has said a system to check the mismatches exists, just not the one the Ohio GOP is seeking.
The U.S. Supreme Court did not express an opinion on whether Brunner was correctly implementing the federal Help America Vote Act, the law the Ohio GOP said she was not complying with.
In the state case, the Ohio Supreme Court ordered Brunner to respond by Monday and for both sides to submit briefs by Friday, Oct. 24, the day before absentee ballot envelopes are scheduled to be opened.
Permalink | Comments (16) | Post your comment |
Tweet
