The New York Times has a good piece on what's happening in Ohio today with regards to the recent ruling forcing Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to provide a list of voters who didn't match government databases to election officials. The result is that thousands of people who aren't disenfranchised entirely may end up being forced to cast provisional ballots, which makes it less likely that their votes will be counted at all.
Social Security data indicate that Ohio election officials found more than 200,000 names that did not match this year; state election officials say their analysis of the data indicates that most of these are individual voters, not duplicate registrations. But Ms. Brunner said that problems with the databases could very well be why the names did not match.
“Federal government red tape, misstated technical information or glitches in databases should not be the basis for voters having to cast provisional ballots,” said Ms. Brunner, adding that she plans to require that notifications are sent to all voters whose records have discrepancies.
Republicans will argue that Brunner is, at the very least, leaving the system vulnerable to fraud. But in fact, there are strict first-time voter ID requirements that are set up precisely to prevent fraud. Federal law requires first time voters to provide a federally approved form of identification. Darth Vader can show up on the rolls, but unless he has a driver's license, social security card or utility bill made out to Darth Vader, he's not casting a ballot, unless he can actually do a Jedi mind trick.
Daniel P. Tokaji points out that the original point to using the databases was to make voting easier, not to challenge eligibility:
Daniel P. Tokaji, a law professor and voting expert at Ohio State University, said he thought the appellate decision was wrong. He said the stated purpose of the “matching” requirement in the federal law, the 2002 Help America Vote Act, was to accelerate procedures at the polls, somewhat like an E-Zpass lane at highway toll plazas. It was meant to allow voters to avoid showing identification if they had already been screened using database checks, he said.
The federal matching requirement, Mr. Tokaji said, was not meant to determine eligibility, deter voter fraud or raise added barriers for voters by forcing some to vote provisionally. “The majority judges don't seem to grasp this point,” he said.
Federal law also prohibits voter purges within 90 days of an election, but, because purges are so often conducted in secret and without oversight, some states have gotten away with removing voters in flagrant violation of the law. Still, the purpose of Republicans getting the no-match voter lists is so they can challenge suspected Democrats at the polls. If anything, database errors provide a bizarre kind of cover: Republicans can challenge people based on a typo or discrepancy over a middle initial and simply argue they're worried about the integrity of the election process. If they disenfranchise someone, they can argue they had the best of intentions and that the flaw was in the database.
Which is, of course, why we shouldn't be using them for this purpose.
--A. Serwer
