**Posted by Phineas
We all remember how close Ohio was in 2004, when Bush squeaked it out against Kerry, right? (1) And Obama’s 2012 Ohio margin against Romney? A scant three-percent. And now comes news that over a fifth of the Ohio voter roll is inaccurate.
Hello, Columbus? We have a problem [1]:
More than one out of every five registered Ohio voters is probably ineligible to vote.
In two counties, the number of registered voters actually exceeds the voting-age population: Northwestern Ohio’s Wood County shows 109 registered voters for every 100 eligible, while in Lawrence County along the Ohio River it’s a mere 104 registered per 100 eligible.
Another 31 counties show registrations at more than 90 percent of those eligible, a rate regarded as unrealistic by most voting experts. The national average is a little more than 70 percent.
Keeping those voter rolls clean is the duty of the state’s secretary of state, something each state is obligated to do under the 1993 Motor Voter Act [2]. Ohio Secretary of State Husted wanted to do exactly that, but he recognized it was a big, complicated project and he’d need some help, so he turned to the federal Department of Justice. The same DoJ run by Eric Holder.
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
In a Feb. 10 letter, he asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for a personal meeting to discuss how to balance seemingly conflicting federal laws so he could pare Ohio’s dirty voter list without removing truly eligible voters.
“Common sense says that the odds of voter fraud increase the longer these ineligible voters are allowed to populate our rolls,” Husted said. “I simply cannot accept that.”
Holder’s office has never replied.
When contacted last week by The Dispatch about Husted’s letter, a U.S. Department of Justice spokesman who did not wish to be identified by name said, “The department declines comment.”
Maybe they were too busy trying to figure out what is was Holder was supposed to not remember about seizing journalists’ email and phone records.
But, lest you think this is some one-off thing limited to Ohio, J. Christian Adams, who worked in the DoJ’s Voting Section, revealed three years ago how the Obama-Holder Justice Department had no intention of enforcing [3] Section 7 of Motor-Voter:
In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.
The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity:
“We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.”
Jaws dropped around the room.
In other words, the DoJ that worked for Barack Obama, who would be seeking reelection in three years, was just fine with inaccurate voter rolls stuffed to the gills with dead or otherwise ineligible voters.
Twenty percent in Ohio, a state Obama won by just three percent. Well within the “margin of fraud.”
Makes one wonder who was supposed to be part of that “increased turnout,” doesn’t it?
To quote a certain savior-president, let me be clear: I don’t believe Obama won the election through fraud. The real problem was a lousy Romney campaign, including a terrible voter turnout effort that saw 4.7 million White voters stay home; if they show up, Romney likely wins [4]. (Though one now does have to wonder how much of a role the IRS played in hampering independent turnout efforts by tying up conservative groups’ 501(c) applications.)
But massively inaccurate voter rolls are still a major problem. While stealing an election at the national level would be darned hard to pull off (though they do try [5]), defective voter rolls like Ohio’s make corruption on down-ticket, more local races a lot easier. This was the kind of thing ACORN [6] thrived on.
More fundamentally, it strikes at the very heart of our democratic system by calling into question the integrity of our elections. If the voter rolls are so bad that we can’t be sure who’s voting (and how often), and with a Justice Department positively scornful of enforcing the relevant law, then how can any American have any faith in the legitimacy of their government at any level?
I take it back. It’s not just Columbus that has a problem.
via the PJM Tatler [7]
Footnote:
(1) I don’t know about you, but, for the record, I was alternating between biting my nails to the quick and the Jack Daniels’ bottle that night.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets [8])