COLUMBUS — Now it's the Ohio Supreme Court's turn to wrestle with the dispute between Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and Ohio Republicans over mismatched voter registrations.

Just hours after the Ohio Republican Party lost in the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, Oct. 17, David Myhal, a registered Republican from New Albany in Franklin County, asked the all-Republican Ohio Supreme Court to tell Brunner to instruct county boards of elections not to process or count absentee ballots cast by voters registered after Jan. 1 before reviewing them for mismatches.

"Absent this court's immediate intervention, the votes of Ohio's qualified voters risk being diluted and public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process will be severely undermined," the new lawsuit said.

While the Ohio Republican Party is not a party to the suit, Myhal is represented by Columbus attorney William Todd, who has close ties to the Ohio GOP. Todd could not be reached.

Jeff Ortega, Brunner's spokesman, responded to the new suit:

"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 state Supreme Court ordered Brunner to respond by Monday, Oct. 20, and for both sides to submit briefs by Friday, Oct. 24, the day before absentee ballot envelopes are to be opened. After that, it won't be possible to identify who the ballot came from.

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.

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.

Edward "Ned" Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University's Mortiz College of Law, said the Ohio Supreme Court first must determine if Myhal has legal standing to challenge Brunner before ruling on whether Brunner was following the law.

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 spelling or clerical errors. Her office has said a system to check the mismatches exists, just not the one the Ohio GOP is seeking.

The new lawsuit would affect only absentee ballots, not all 200,000 mismatches.