Annie
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www.dcexaminer.com >> Quin Hillyer
Should anyone care?
www.dcexaminer.com >> Quin Hillyer
Quin-essential cases: No Righting Voting Wrongs in Ohio
By Quin Hillyer
Examiner Columnist | 10/21/08 10:20 AM
Topping the list of most important legal cases this election year may be one in which the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits, and about which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) turned a blind eye to justice. Rampant voter fraud may well result.
The nations highest court ruled Friday that, for now, a federal district court cannot force Ohios Secretary of State to enforce federal elections laws that she is flagrantly ignoring. Oddly enough, the Supreme Court is right: A loophole allows the Secretary of State to make a mockery of the law unless and until DOJ steps in.
But DOJ is so busy suppressing political speech that it cant be bothered with enforcing voting laws. This is especially true for voting laws that inconvenience the campaign of Barack Obama to whom top DoJ election lawyers have given large campaign donations.
If Attorney General Michael Mukasey doesnt step in, hes a virtual accessory to the crime.
The case itself is rather straightforward. Ohios election laws allow for early voting even for newly registered voters of which there are an astonishing 666,000 in recent months. The federal Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) requires the chief State election official [and local election officials] to match information in the database of the statewide voter registration system to verify the accuracy of the information provided on applications for voter registration.
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, acknowledges there are discrepancies on some 200,000 new registrations, but she adamantly refuses to provide the county election boards with the state voter registration information necessary for the cross-checks.
Responding to a suit brought by the Ohio Republican Party, a federal district court and the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals both ordered Brunner to comply with the law by providing the information.
The Supreme Court, though, overturned the order. We express no opinion on the question whether HAVA is being properly implemented, the court wrote in an extraordinarily brief decision. Instead, the court ruled that a private party such as the state GOP had no standing to bring such a suit, because HAVA provides that the Attorney General may bring a civil action to enforce the law but fails to provide for anyone else to do so.
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Should anyone care?