Jennifer Brunner, that is, Secretary of State of Ohio. The person whose Number One priority is to
We want citizens to have faith that Ohio elections are free, fair, open and honest to encourage the highest level of participation in our democracy.
Secretaries of State, you see, only get public attention every election cycle, usually in hand-wringing stories, after the fact, of elections gone horribly wrong (see Florida 2000; Ohio 2004). The Secretary of State Project - "Support Secretaries of State who will protect the election" - has a home page picture of one who didn't protect the election: Katherine Harris of Florida, the Cruella of vote suppression. The Secstate Project supported Jennifer Brunner's election over, as they say, "the Cheney/Bush crony who was on the brink of buying the election."
When Secstate Brunner says she wants to "encourage the highest level of participation in our democracy," please do not dismiss it as a boring mission statement or platitude. Because that is exactly what the Republican Party in states like Michigan want to prevent:
The Obama campaign yesterday went to court to block what it alleged was an attempt by Republicans in Michigan to stop people who lost their homes in the mortgage crisis from voting in November's election.
The suit, filed in a Michigan court yesterday, is the latest sign of contention over voting procedures. Voting rights activists in several battleground states have reported an aggressive push by Republican elected officials and activists to make it harder to vote.
In Macomb county, Michigan, a swing constituency, Republican officials for the first time tried to use America's housing crisis as a way of striking people off lists, the Obama camp told reporters yesterday. "There is no doubt that there is an immediate threat to the voting rights of citizens in Michigan whose names could appear on a foreclosure list," said Bob Bauer, an Obama lawyer.
The situation came to light last week when the Republican party chairman of Macomb county told a local newspaper he planned to draw on publicly available lists of home foreclosures to bar people from casting their vote.
The blood boils. As the Secstate Project commented, "it doesn't get much lower than this; lose your house, lose your vote." The story is in today's London Guardian, datelined Washington by Suzanne Goldenberg.
But, as we saw in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 and several places in 2006, vote suppression doesn't always need nasty Republican Rovians manipulating the lists, ensuring the machines have no paper trail, or disseminating disinformation on the scheduled day or venue for the election (see the excellent film "The Uncounted" for a full accounting of the trickery). Sometimes, you just need mass confusion. Consider this, from yesterday's New York Times:
For more than two weeks, Palm Beach County [Florida] voters have watched with dismay as a local election has devolved into a small-scale sequel of the presidential recount eight years ago, with disappearing ballots, lawsuits and confusion over who won and lost.
The big discrepancy: Roughly 3,500 ballots that disappeared between Election Day and the recount, and an additional 176 that do not appear to have been counted at all.
“We felt cursed or jinxed,” said Mary McCarty, a Palm Beach County commissioner for 18 years who served on this latest election’s canvassing board, reviewing and counting ballots. “At least in 2000 we had all our ballots.”
In my diplomatic days, I observed elections in places like Algeria and Egypt, where the stakes are usually high and where simply having parties, NGOs, and interested citizens watchdog the process can sometimes make a difference. In many technologically advanced countries, ballots are still paper, and are hand counted. They still manage to have uncontested outcomes that are announced on the election day evening news. It's not rocket science. And yet...
I'm glad that the Obama people are standing up for the evicted Michigan citizens who just want to vote. Maybe, if they can retain their voting rights despite bad luck in receiving a dodgy mortgage, they'll make a connection between the people who want to disenfranchise voters and the party that made their eviction inevitable through dereliction of its regulatory duties.
Which may be why the Republicans want to deprive them of their vote.