Jennifer Brunner cancels cross-checking of Ohio's new voters

Reginald Fields     Cleveland Plain Dealer    30 October 2008

It is impossible to cross-check nearly 700,000 new or revised voter registrations filed this year without crashing Ohio's registration system, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said Thursday. She added that the entire system will have to be rebuilt after next week's election so that fraud can be more easily detected.

Brunner said she discovered the system was too fragile to double-check the names, which her staff began trying to do earlier this month after the Ohio Republican Party sued the Democratic secretary to force her to check the registrations. At the time, even as she fought the lawsuit and eventually won at the U.S. Supreme Court, Brunner said she was making an effort to cross-check the registrations against state driver's license and federal social security records.

"I spoke too soon," Brunner said during a press briefing on election day procedures for Ohio, again expected to be a closely watched state in the presidential election.

Earlier this month, Brunner told The Plain Dealer that a cursory review by her staff had found about 200,000 discrepancies in the newly filed or revised registrations since Jan. 1. That does not mean each was a case of fraud, but could mean someone incorrectly jotted down a driver's license or Social Security digit on the applications.

But the Ohio Republican Party suggested that some of those cases could amount to voter fraud and that Brunner, as the state's top elections officer, was obligated to double-check the information. Brunner argued that federal rules only require the state to have a system in place for double-checking registrations but do not require her to make the checks.

Brunner said in recent days she has consulted with contractors who have concluded that there is no way the current voter registration system can handle massive checks of newly registered voters. Instead, Brunner said she was informed that each of the 700,000 registrations would have to be hand-checked one-by-one, which could not be completed before Tuesday's election and which Brunner is not obligated to do.

The secretary also outlined a host of new election procedures that are different from 2004, when Ohio's election process was mocked for having long lines, broken voting machines and unprepared poll workers.

Brunner said her office has addressed each of those issues. And she said anyone in line at 7:30 p.m. when polls officially close will be allowed to cast ballots. Brunner said she expects an unprecedented 80 percent of Ohio's 8.3 million registered voters to turn out.

The push for early voting and absentee voting will help ease the Election Day crush of voters, she said. The secretary figures about 25 percent of those who plan to vote will already have done so before Tuesday.

Brunner also said that Ohioans will probably go to bed Tuesday night still uncertain who voters here have picked to be the next president of the United States.

"People have said to me, 'Do we think that we'll have all the final results in by election day?' That would be by midnight," said Brunner. "Probably not. Will we have a good sense of what the overall results are in Ohio by midnight? I think we will."