blogger interrupted

We old election observers have a habit of waiting to see what the pattern is before leaping into the fray, which is why I’ve been holding off on jumping into this fray in Ohio.  Well, I’m about ready to put on the old credentials and start observing.  Because I think I figured out what’s going on here.

Beginning with this latest ruling, which has people freaked.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered Ohio’s top elections official to set up a system by Friday to verify the eligibility of new voters and make the information available to the state’s 88 county election boards.

The full 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld a lower court ruling that Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner must use other government records to check thousands of new voters for registration fraud.

OK everyone.  Calm down.  600,000 new voters aren’t going to go into the garbage can.  In fact, it seems to me utterly impossible for Brunner to enforce this before the election.  The ruling itself is a kind of a joke.  How the hell is a court supposed to enforce a redundant, and potentially unconstitutional, review of 600,000 voter registrations in less than 2-3 weeks? 

Here’s what’s really going on, at least based on what I saw as a Kerry challenger in 2004. The REAL goal with all these machinations and tamperings with electoral processes (which put together are likely illegal, and will, or should, eventually put someone in jail) is to get as many new voters as possible to vote provisional.  

Voting provisional accomplishes two things for GOP strategy.  It puts the ballot aside for review, before it is counted, and keeps the ballot from going into the main box, where it is immediately counted, without review.  So the first canvass of precincts, i.e. the count on election night, will not reflect provisional numbers.  That means that unless Ohio is a clear decision one way or another on election night, doubt will be sown about the result, because so many provisionals will have been cast, and will have yet to be counted.

Second, voting provisional puts a ballot in another pile for review.  If the election in Ohio goes into a recount, every one of these provisional ballots will be challenged, and litigated, right down to the chad.  The pile of provisionals in Ohio is where Florida 2000 lurks.  The bigger that pile, the more chance there is for chaos in the system which will benefit John McCain.  

Why is the GOP trying to maximize provisionals in the courts, TODAY, instead of at the precinct, on ELECTION DAY?  Again, based on my experience in 2004, the reason this is happening now is that it actually can’t happen on election day, for both legal, and operational reasons.

The legal reason?  In 2004, the GOP let this entire strategy rest on their precinct challengers, at the polling place level.  The challengers were permitted by law to challenge a voter’s registration, get the precinct official to question it, and thus get the voter to vote provisional.  In 2008, precinct challengers are no longer permitted.  So no one in the precinct representing the GOP can challenge registrations on November 4.  That’s the legal reason for making this a pre-election day tampering effort.

The operational reason?  This effort collapsed on election day, largely because the GOP had a hard time deploying an organization of people with the onions to stand between a black man and his vote in Democratic precincts.  I ran into so few of them on election day in 2004, seeing just one GOP challenger was news, and even those eventually gave up, because not a single person in a black precinct in Cleveland wanted them there.  That’s a little hard for a squiddly little douchebag goober from Bay Village to endure.  And if they couldn’t do it in 2004, they sure as hell can’t mount even that level of organization in 2008.

So in 2008, the GOP is trying to gum up this process from above, rather than at the grassroots.  They can’t do it at the precinct level legally, or organizationally.  They are trying to get courts to do what they themselves are incapable of doing on election day.  Cowards have a funny way of getting other people to do their dirty work.

So how do we combat this?  One way is micro, the other is macro.

The micro strategy?  The goal at the precinct level should be to make sure as few voters as possible are forced to vote provisional.   We can still battle this in the precinct, even though challengers are not permitted, with media, bloggers keeping an eye on the process, and well trained Democratic precinct workers.  I’m sure the ODP is coming up with other strategies as well, like voter education to ensure that new voters are prepared to show ID, battle to get a real ballot, not a provisional, and stand firm.

The macro strategy?  

Turnout.

The number of provisionals in Ohio will almost certainly be larger than in 2004.  It’s both a function of the number of new registers, and the GOP’s pre-election efforts in the courts.  For these provisionals to matter in the least, Ohio’s margin needs to be narrow.  

So we need to make that margin as big as possible.  We need to get so many voters to the polls, turnout so many black votes in black precincts, that Ohio is called for Barack early in the evening, and the final margin among normally cast ballots is so large, that provisionally cast ballots are irrelevant.  Case.  Closed.

In short, we can destroy their efforts at tampering with democracy, with democracy itself.