Quin-essential cases: No Righting Voting Wrongs in Ohio
By: Quin Hillyer
Examiner Columnist
October 21, 2008
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 nation’s highest court ruled Friday that, for now, a federal district court cannot force Ohio’s 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 can’t 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 doesn’t step in, he’s a virtual accessory to the crime.
The case itself is rather straightforward. Ohio’s 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.
Yet Mukasey is nowhere to be found, perhaps because the career attorneys in his Civil Rights Division seem to lean well to the political left.
Consider the California case in which the division’s lawyers have actually indicted former Republican congressional candidate Tan Nguyen for making “misleading statements to investigators.”
About what? Nguyen was tangentially involved with sending a letter that urged Latino citizens to vote but warned that illegal immigrants could be prosecuted if they tried to vote.
Every word in the letter was true. But DOJ investigators were more interested in cracking down on the people who wrote the letter – a legitimate expression of free-speech rights – than on the illegal immigrants who may be voting.
The kicker: The DOJ attorney on the case, former Ted Kennedy-affiliated lawyer James Walsh, is as contributor to the Obama campaign, as is his boss, former ACLU attorney Mark Kappelhoff.
In all, DOJ lawyers and staff in the metro area have donated at least $150,000 to Obama.
No wonder they seem more interested in prosecuting those who warn against vote fraud than enforcing vote-fraud laws.
Now, let’s return to the Ohio case. Again, there are some 200,000 discrepancies that the Secretary of State won’t help clear up. And nationwide there are a growing number of counties with more people registered to vote than there are actual voting-age adults in the county. What’s going on?
The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund reported from Ohio that “local election officials tell me the volume of possibly fraudulent registrations will make it difficult to process those that are valid.”
The goal: “deliberate chaos in the election system,” which the perpetrators “can then exploit on Election Day to demand that suspect votes be given the benefit of the doubt and counted.”
Mukasey, though, sees no evil – despite the Supreme Court’s public invitation for DOJ to step in – and the law in Ohio goes unenforced.
Quin Hillyer is associate editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at qhillyer@dcexaminer.com.
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