The GOP Plan For Stealing The Election Becomes Clear

With yesterday's decision that Ohio's Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, has to come up with a new plan to verify every one of Ohio's 666,000 new registered voters by Friday, the GOP is licking its chops and waiting for its chance to strike.

The stunning reversal of fortune for Ohio's chief election officer, Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, is sweet victory for Ohio Republicans, who have been waging war with her since she took office in 2007. With only weeks before Election Day, Ohio Republicans have become exercised over reports of voter registration fraud, especially by the national community organizing group ACORN, which has undertaken a voter registration drive in other states that produced 1.3 million new voters, a figure Republicans and the campaign of John S. McCain dispute as valid and are challenging as fraudulent.

The AP story reported by Philip Elliott is that the full 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld a lower court's ruling that Brunner must use other government records to check the thousands of new voters for registration fraud. This "enbanc" decision overrules the decision last Friday by a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit that said, for reasons including the lack of time before the election, state election officials did not have to inform local boards of elections of mismatches so they could investigate further or help resolve discrepancies that might only be the result of unintentional administrative errors.

Bob Bennett, Ohio GOP chairman since 1988, is getting his political pound of flesh. "Her delay in providing this matching system leaves little time for election officials to act on questionable registrations," Ohio GOP Chairman Bob Bennett said Tuesday night, according to the AP. The man who Brunner fired from his job of running the Cuyahoga Board of Elections in early 2007, just a few weeks after she took office, is no doubt reveling in the political ramifications of the court's decision.

"Once again, Jennifer Brunner has wasted valuable taxpayer dollars only to have her partisan agenda rejected by a court of law. Her shameful actions to disenfranchise Republican absentee voters, block the transparency of early voting and refuse the proper verification of newly registered voters have rightfully damaged her credibility as a nonpartisan election administrator. She is destroying the public trust in Ohio's elections system." [Bob Bennett, Ohio GOP Chairman]

Here's how I see this playing out if I were the Ohio GOP:

With polls showing that Obama's lead in Ohio is growing daily, the Ohio GOP will almost certainly use this decision as a basis to sue Brunner in the state should Obama win, claiming that the majority of these new voters could not possibly have been properly vetted in 18 days. The margin of victory in Ohio will certainly be closer than 666,000 votes.

The GOP will sue to get these votes thrown out, claiming that they are fradulent until proven valid. That's quite a nasty precedent. I'm not sure if it will be enough to stop the Obama landslide, but if Obama wins by less than 42 electoral votes, it might just give McSame the election. It's unlikely, as the numbers show Obama more likely to have something of a 180 EV lead or so.

Still, the GOP may use the decision to challenge, oh, I don't know, every voter registration period or something insaneo like that. I know, horrendously unlikely.

You know, like Florida in 2000.

You think this GOP is going down without a fight? Not me.