Republicans Abuse Prosecutorial Powers to Intimidate Voters

(Editor's note: This story was published late Thursday, before the Obama campaign counsel Bob Bauer addressed many of these same issues in a media conference call on Friday.)

As the presidential election comes to a close, the Republican Party -- and its allies in law enforcement at the FBI and at county levels in Ohio -- are announcing voting-related prosecutions that civil rights advocates say are intended to intimidate voters, despite prosecutorial rules that bar these disclosures before an election.

The foremost example was Thursday's leak to the media by top FBI officials of a new investigation of ACORN, a low-income advocacy group which registered 1.3 million new voters in swing states in 2008. The Associated Press reported "senior officials" confirmed the FBI investigation, saying they "spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations particularly so close to an election."

"The reports by unnamed sources within the FBI that they have begun an investigation of ACORN is patently inconsistent with the DOJ prosecution manual," said Gerry Hebert, a former Justice Department Voting Section Chief who now runs the Campaign Legal Center in Washington.

"Whether they are prosecuting or not, it is clearly intimidation," said Jeff Gamso, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Ohio. "That is what press reports do. You intimidate people into not going to the polls and not voting."

The FBI leak has counterparts at the county level in Ohio, raising the same voter intimidation concerns.

In Columbus, Franklin County Prosecuting Attorney Ron O'Brien, a Republican, confirmed in numerous state media reports on Wednesday that he was investigating a group called Vote From Home, which registered more than 11,000 new voters from inner-city neighborhoods. A Franklin County Board of Elections spokesman said it learned about the group from a college website and found some of its members had registered and already voted in Ohio.

"The story indicated that these people were out of state Democratic Party activists who moved into Columbus to work temporarily and they listed this Columbus address as their residence to vote," said Ben Piscitelli, the BOE spokesman. "Under state law, you have to be a resident in the state 30 days prior to the election. The residence has to be a place to which you plan to return."

Piscitelli said it did not appear the group's members, who include students from the nation's top law schools, could meet the ongoing residency requirement. "We referred this to the Franklin County prosecutor to see what is illegal about this," he said. "As we explained to local reporters, there is nothing inherently illegal about having 13 people register at a single address."

"Vote From Home's great crime is they helped 11,000 people register to vote and helped people get absentee ballots," said Robert Fitrakis, a Columbus election lawyer. "All this was leaked to the press, to FOX news, to TV-6, which is Sinclair Broadcasting, which is more conservative than Fox News ... They are trying to put a chilling effect on voting. They are trying to scare people into not voting by using criminal prosecutions."

Franklin County Prosecuting Attorney Ron O'Brien did not return requests to comment.

The FBI leak and Franklin County investigation are not the only examples of publicized legal tactics in Ohio that civil rights lawyers say are intended to scare new voters.

In recent weeks, the Ohio Republican Party and Democratic secretary of State have been at odds in federal court over whether Social Security and state motor vehicle records can be used to verify or reject more than 200,000 voter registrations -- equal to a third of the state's new voters in 2008. On Wednesday, the day the secretary of state appealed a federal court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, an Ohio Republican Party spokesman said the GOP did not intend to use these database records to challenge voter registrations -- an assertion that left some Democrats saying the Republicans had embarked on a "chaos" campaign to confuse the public.