I already posted on the news that the Bush administration has asked the Justice Department to act on John Boehner’s request and look into whether or not 200,000 Ohio voters should have to reconfirm their registrations before Election Day. Daniel P. Tokaji, who filed an amicus brief on behalf of several civil-rights groups looking to prevent the local GOP from getting their hands on the mismatched voters list, says that’s unlikely.
Tokaji says that “there's no practical way to do it eight days before the elections; it would be complete chaos to make all these voters reconfirm their eligibility,” adding that “there's no basis in law for requiring voters to reconfirm their eligibility because the database hasn't matched them.”
But that doesn't mean that these voters will get their votes counted. Adam Skaggs at the Brennan Center for Justice says that, although it hasn't responded yet, “the Justice Department could intervene by going back to the same federal court that originally approved the Republican Party’s request, and could get an order saying that these 200,000 voters would have to cast provisional ballots.”
Skaggs' colleague Michael Waldman refers to provisional ballots as “placebo votes” because so few of them get counted.
--A. Serwer
