"A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more money than hundred men with guns"

Shortly after I first registered to vote, I received letters from both my county Democratic Party and Republican Party welcoming me into the democratic process and introduced me to their parties' philosophies.  Back then, the parties believed that new voters should be welcomed and persuaded to support their cause in the marketplace of ideas.

Now, I fear that new registratants are more likely to get a subpoena with a threat of felony election fraud from the Republican Party.  Although, you can't blame the Republicans for giving up on persuasion.  After all, they realize that there's a reason hundreds of thousands of citizens who have long stayed silent in their slumbering apathy have suddenly been jolted awake by the utter failure of our intelligence network on 9/11, Iraq, or finding Osama bin Laden.  The $700 Billion corporate Wall Street bailout.  And the cratering national economy.  The Republican Party knows it can't wipe its fingerprints from the steering wheel of the nation so easily.

And they know that people shocked out of their apathy today aren't going to be persuaded to vote for the same party that wrecked our ship of state into the ground, either.  So, in the face of a historical rarity of two straight cycles of brutal defeat, the Republicans have no choice, apparently, but to try to scare those awaken voices into silence and to suggest to its dwindling number of supporters that its political philosophy has not been defeated, it has been unjustly murdered.

But to suggest that the Republicans have no choice is itself but a lie.  Perhaps they should look to their standard bearer's campaign and decide if his slogan is nothing more than commercial jingle.  Perhaps, if John McCain reminded himself of the values of his country that he admired so much as he endured unspeakable torture and humilation in her name.  Maybe if he thought about his son, Sarah Palin's, and Joe Biden's, and why they've been willing to go to Iraq to serve their country.  Maybe then, he'd realized that what his party is doing in Ohio is a greater threat to western democracy than the North Vietnamese ever were.  Maybe then, he'd actually put country first.

The GOP has been in an all-out blitz to do two things: 1) stem the tide of hundreds of thousands of new voters from speaking out this election day and 2) delegitimize their defeat by falsely suggesting their historic defeat was the product of fraud.  Not even Al-Qaeda could fantasize such an undermining of American democracy as the Ohio Republican Party has done in the past few weeks.  And yes, it is precisely that: legal terrorism.

The Ohio Republican Party has employed an entire public relations and legal srategy to throw the entire kitchen sink to raise any harebrained theory of "fraud" and smear against Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner they can provide.  They have falsely accused of her being partisan and not doing her job, an allegation that has been rejected numerous time by both State and federal courts by liberal, partisan "activist" judges like Ohio Supreme Court Justice Thomas Moyer, and U.S. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice John Roberts.  These courts, in almost every instance, has rejected the Ohio Republican Party's legal theory.  In almost every instance, the courts have found that the Secretary of State was correctly applying the law.  Again, even in the few instances in which Brunner has lost, it's been met with dissents by noted conservative jurist like Chief Justice Moyer.

The Ohio Republican Party says, on one hand, that Jennifer Brunner refuses to cross-reference the 660,000 new voter registrations with the Social Security Administration's database and the state's Bureau of Motor Vehicles.  For a party built on the philosophy that government is not the answer, but is the problem, the Ohio Republican Party's new found faith in the infalliblility of government bureaucrats to maintain data is breathtaking hypocracy.  On the other hand, the ORP stresses the urgency of the moment because 200,000 voter registrations have found to be "suspect."  What the Ohio GOP has cleverly concealed is where it came up with that number:  it's the number of registrations that Jennifer Brunner says had data conflict with the very databases the ORP has publicly accused Brunner of refusing to check.

The real issus is that the Ohio Republicans want to know the identity of each one of those registrations so that it may make a blanket challenge to every one of them before election day, forcing any of these registrants (if they show up at the polls with identification, which again, would suggest that these aren't "Mickey Mouse" registrations we're talking about here) to vote by provisional ballot.  So that if the race comes down to Ohio, the Ohio GOP can have as many ballots as possible tied from the count so they can fully litigate every ballot in litigation similar to the "Chad-gate" of Florida in 2000.  If Obama wins in the electoral landslide he is predicted, or Ohio won't affect the result, the Ohio GOP could give a rat's ass if Mickey or Minnie Mouse voted. 

And yet, Brunner, that partisan Secretary of State who has somehow gotten conservative judges in on her conspiracy to elect Barack Obama President, points out that Congress has stated in HAVA that the mere fact that there's a conflict of data with these databases CANNOT be used as a basis to challenge the validity of any voter registration.  Why would the then-Republican Congress and President Bush sign such a law?  Because even in 2002, the Congress realized that while the cross-checking with databases provided some verification, it was an imperfect system as the quality integrity of these database is incredibly poor.  In fact, in a study, it was found that 80% of the discripencies could been written off immediately as the result off government employee error, and almost all the rest were the result of "immaterial discrepancies."  In other words, Congress had a pretty valid reason to say that the mere existence of a discrepancy from these check is insufficient to challenge a person's registration or vote.

And yet, in the face of an adverse ruling by the United States Supreme Court, the Ohio Republican Party has already turned around to seek judicial assistance under essentially the same theory from the Ohio Supreme Court.  This over a problem so "severe" that the last Secretary of State/Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell had a novel solution to resolve it: notify only county board of elections if the other records indicated that the registrant was now deceased  and otherwise "registration errors resolve themselves during the 'check-in' process while voting."  In other words, the issue that the Ohio Republican Party has spent countless legal filings and press releases blasting Brunner over is on an issue that objectively Brunner has treated more seriously than her predecessor, who's handling of the matter was to let the poll observers on election day when the ballots are cast sort them out.  Blackwell's solution was met with utter silence by the Ohio Republican Party.

Although the legal strategy has largely been a failure, the public relations portion of it has not thanks to a complacent media who cares more about reporting on the existence of a conflict than to provide objective reporting of the validity of the conflict.

But it hasn't, despite one conservative blogger's celebration to the contrary, been entirely successful.  According to Rasmussen, 53% of Ohio voters are very confident that they vote will be properly counted and the right candidate will be declared the victor.  Another 34% are somewhat confident.  And only a minority of Ohioans actually believe people who aren't allowed to vote will be able to vote.  A majority of Ohioans believe that the election in two weeks will be fair, despite the concerted efforts of the Ohio Republican Party to suggest otherwise.

Undermining elections should not be a permissible political strategy.  And yet, the Ohio Republican Party has been filing one frivolous lawsuit after another to demand that judicial activism give them the relief that the elected legislature has explicitly denied them: the ability to challenge a registration or a vote solely on the basis that the information on the registration conflicts with some data on other government databases.  One cannot imagine a singlar hypocritical act that so invalidates a party's dedication to their political philosophy.

And yet, even Ohio's conservative bloggers, in moments of unprecedently candor, will admit that the entire voter registration "fraud" campaign is, itself, the fraud.  Here's what one conservative blogger admitted when I pointed out many of the points I've made here:

I’m with you that this is more of a tempest than a real concern, unless it’s close, like within 50,000. which it likely won’t be. But the PR value is such that it could lose you the election. That’s the Democrats problem.

No, that's an American problem.  When you falsely undermine the public's confidence in our elections, that's an American problem, not a political partisan problem.  When you engage in a campaign to depress voter turnout or intimidate new voters from voting, let's call it for what it is: it's wiping your arse with the American flag, it's spitting on the face of every veteran, and its urinating on every veterans' tombstone.

And that is the Ohio Republican Party's sick problem.