Stickers reading "I Made a Difference, So Can You, Vote" are taking on a completely new meaning as investigations continue to find out-of-state-voters, underage voters, and duplicate registrations in Ohio.• A 33-year-old native Californian voted in Ohio on Oct. 4 using the address of a German Village house. The current resident of that house and the Californian were roommates at UCLA in the mid-1990s. The California native is registered as a permanent vote-by-mail voter in San Francisco County, meaning that he can vote there as well. He had utilities connected at his new business address in San Francisco on Sept. 1. His MySpace account, last updated in August, lists his address in San Francisco.A review of the Franklin county Ohio voter registration records reveals that a Patrick Wang, 33, registered to vote on Oct. 4, 2008 at an address in German Village.
In Highland County, 95-year-old Mildred Meddock registered and voted for the first time in her life despite her advanced Alzheimer's disease.
Her granddaughters learned of her newfound patriotism when they visited the nursing home where Meddock lives and saw an "I voted today" sticker on her clothing.
Records show that Meddock registered Sept. 26 when two Highland County Board of Elections employees visited the home, Heartland of Hillsboro, about 65 miles south of Columbus. Four other residents also were registered and voted that day.
"I'm hot. I'm livid," said granddaughter Chrystal Brown. "A month ago, she couldn't tell you her name she was so bad, and, depending on what time of day it is, her name is the only thing she can tell you."
Brunner characterized the vote as "odd".
The Dispatch also found votes cast by apparent out-of-staters living in New York, Kentucky, and California.
• A man who most recently lived at Rescue Mission in Syracuse, N.Y. He listed his address as 154 E. Long St. Downtown. There's no such address. The 49-year-old man never has registered to vote in New York.
• A 27-year-old man who has lived in Kentucky since 1998 listed his address as 2462 Parsons Ave. That address, if it existed, would fall somewhere below the Rt. 104 overpass near the railroad tracks in a heavily industrialized area of the South Side.
• A 33-year-old native Californian voted in Ohio on Oct. 4 using the address of a German Village house.
Damschroder agrees. In a county with nearly 850,000 registered voters, "One (double voter) is not indicative of systematic problems. It's indicative of a system that works," he said, referring to the California man with ballots here and there.I'm not quite sure what system is supposed to be working, but I think ACORN and the Obama campaign know what he's talking about.
The warning went out to both campaigns and the campaign spokesmen from both campaigns are registered in Ohio.O'Brien has spoken to attorneys for both campaigns and asked election officials to review the residency status of John McCain's and Barack Obama's staff members, as well as those of other get-out-the-vote groups, who have few Ohio ties but registered and requested absentee ballots.
"One thing that is crystal-clear is the law -- if you are a temporary resident or a visitor, you are not entitled to register to vote and you're not entitled to vote," O'Brien, a Republican, told The Dispatch yesterday.
He recommended that anyone with a questionable registration from those groups destroy their absentee ballots and steer clear of the polls. "There is no debate. Ohio law says it in black and white."
I'm glad to see officials taking this seriously. Maybe if people see the consequences of this, they'd think twice before trying.O'Brien already was investigating 12 people involved with the group Vote From Home who registered and have cast or requested absentee ballots. All list their address as the same Brownlee Avenue house on the East Side.
The Vote from Home members, who came to Columbus to register new voters, are from out of state and have no apparent intention of remaining here after the election -- raising questions about whether they meet legal residency requirements to vote.
Underaged voters? Duplicate registrations?In Hamilton County, 17 people are registered to vote from riverfront addresses south of Mehring Way - places with street numbers that would put their homes somewhere in the Ohio River.
Another 46 voters are registered at addresses that would put their homes in the middle of the Paul Brown Stadium parking lot, or at the riverfront project known as The Banks - which hasn't been built.
An Enquirer analysis of more than 8 million Ohio voter registration records found a litany of quirks, inconsistencies, errors, duplicate registrations and other problems with little more than two weeks until Election Day.
Thousands of voters appear on registration lists twice - some as many as six times. At least 589 registered voters - mostly in Franklin and Cuyahoga counties - were born in 1991 or later, which puts them under the legal voting age.
Voters are registered at post office boxes, office buildings with no residences, police stations and even park benches.
Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner estimated that an initial review found that about 200,000 newly registered voters reported information that did not match motor-vehicle or Social Security records, Brunner spokesman Kevin Kidder said.
Brunner previously cross-checked new-voter registrations with databases run by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicle and the Social Security Administration and made the results available online, but the 6th Circuit said the information was not accessible in a way that would help county election boards ferret out mismatches.
Brunner also said counties will have access within a week to a list of new
voters whose registration information does not match records with the state
Bureau of Motor Vehicles or Social Security Administration. But what
elections officials are supposed to do with that list remains a mystery.
This is the information I submitted an open records request for and stated should be easy to provide.
Brunner said in her directive: "To reinforce our preparations for a
successful election that ensures voter confidence, I hereby direct boards of
elections to swiftly and fully investigate all specific allegations or evidence
of voter registration fraud, illegal voting or voter suppression in their
respective jurisdictions."But during a press conference today, she said reports of widespread voter
fraud are overblown."I don't believe there is an effort underway to steal the election," Brunner
said. "Ohio's bipartisan election officials have a duty to investigate
specific allegations of wrongdoing, protecting the rights of eligible voters in
the process. Republicans and Democrats both want fair elections, and our
preparation in Ohio is already showing results with successful absentee
voting."
I generally agree with her. It is a very good idea to provide this information to the county election boards and there was no reason not to. From an overall percentage perspective, the number of irregularities in the Ohio registered voters list is pretty small and the bipartisan county election officials are working together to investigate. For example in Cleveland, a very highly Democratic area of the state, the county election officials took it upon themselves to investigate ACORN instead of trying to hide or defend the group.
Ohio's election officials have not been as partisan as the Florida officials appears in the Bush/Gore election.
While I agree with Brunner that I don't believe there is a widespread coordinated effort to steal the election in Ohio, I do think it's important to open up the information so everyone can see that is the case.
It appears Brunner has taken a step in that direction.
The three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Brunner is not required to provide county elections boards with the names of voters whose personal information does not match state motor-vehicle or federal Social Security records, as ordered Thursday by U.S. District Court Judge George C. Smith of Columbus.What's amazing is how trivial this request would be to perform. The information is stored in the state's database.
Q. How are new voter registrations checked in Ohio?Brunner's office already makes a subset of this database available on it's website in a common format that can be easily loaded into databases for analysis. In fact, it is this subset that I have been analyzing for the last week. To perform the additional mismatch analysis requested, it would be necessary to add a single Yes/No indicator to the format of the file already being provided. This should be trivial.
A. Counties enter the information from new voters into their computer systems, and it is uploaded to a state database to check for duplicates
from other counties.
The personal information also is matched against state motor-vehicle and federal Social Security records.
Q. What if the motor-vehicle and Social Security records don't match the voter registration?
A. A notation is made on the voter's record in the state database, but counties are not sent a list of mismatches and can only access them by reviewing voter records one by one in the database. An appeals court is reviewing a judge's order that the counties must be given a list of the mismatches.
"Sometimes, they come up and bribe me with a cigarette, or they'll give me a dollar to sign up," said Freddie Johnson, 19, who filled out 72 separate voter-registration cards over an 18-month period at the behest of the left-leaning Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now...Armed with this information, I searched the 8 million registered voters in Ohio to see what I would find.
Johnson used the same information on all of his registration cards, and officials say they usually catch and toss out duplicate registrations. But the practice sparks fear that some multiple registrants could provide different information and vote more than once by absentee ballot.
Democrat Barack Obama's presidential campaign blitzed bars, and advocates for the homeless have lined up vans to ferry potential voters from shelters.The evicted...
And the underaged...People uprooted by foreclosure may have more on their minds than democracy. But activists are encouraging them to register at their new addresses and vote.
The growing ranks of foreclosed homeowners may care mostly about rebuilding their lives.
"They're basically shell-shocked," said Brian Davis, head of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless.
But Beau Hill, who runs the Salvation Army's Harbor Light shelter in Cleveland, said people, despite the trauma of losing a home, should vote.
"Voting is a life skill," he said.
The Franklin County Board of Elections has been searching for Alyce Donahue. They said she forgot to sign her voter-registration card.Of course there are 1,000 more underaged registered voters out there.But Donahue, contacted by The Dispatch, didn't forget. She never applied. She's 15.
Recently, a local voter-registration group, Oberlin Votes!, attempted to register inmates at the Jail but were turned away by Stammitti. According to press accounts, Stammitti appears to be unwilling to assist the registration efforts in any way. Stammitti’s non-cooperation is in stark contrast to responses by staff and administrators at other Ohio jails who have accommodated voter registration groups without controversy.
