Brennan Center: 2008's Voter Suppression Incidents So Far

(Editor's note: The Brennan Center will be updating and re-posting this document regularly between now and Election Day. This inventory is current as of October 22, 2008)

No Match, No Vote

ISSUE: Some states will not register voters or will purge them from the voter rolls if election officials cannot match their voter registration information against information in other government databases. The problem is the computer match processes states use are inherently unreliable. Between 15% and 30% of all match attempts fail because of typos, other administrative errors, and minor discrepancies between database records, such as a maiden name in one record and a married name in another or a hyphen in one record and not another. No match, no vote policies can block hundreds of thousands of voters through no fault of their own. More information on no match, no vote policies is available here. This year, no match, no vote efforts across the country, if successful, could have a significant impact on the election, affecting tens of thousands of new voters.

Ohio

On September 26, 2008, the Ohio Republican Party asked a federal court to issue an emergency ruling requiring the state to generate a list of more than 200,000 new voters whose information did not match other state records, presumably so those voters could be purged from the rolls right before the election, forced to vote provisional ballots, or challenged at the polls. They asked the court before the absentee ballots cast by new registrants were opened and counted. A federal court granted the temporary restraining order, and after a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit stayed that order, the full appeals court, sitting en banc, reinstated it. On emergency review, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the TRO on October 17, 2008, preventing chaos in the election in Ohio and protecting hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens from disenfranchisement-by-typo. That same day, the Ohio Republican Party filed a virtually identical suit with the Ohio Supreme Court, seeking essentially the same relief they lost in the federal courts. They also seek to prevent the counting of absentee ballots cast by unmatched voters unless or until the mismatches are cleared. The Republican fundraising consultant who brought the lawsuit has voluntarily dismissed his case. Ohio Republican Party Chairman Robert T. Bennett said he asked the plaintiff David Myhal to drop the case and plans to meet on October 22, 2008 with Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, representing Secretary Brunner, to discuss an out-of-court solution to the dispute. Regardless of the outcome, non-matching voters may still face challenges on Election Day by partisan election workers. Further details can be found here.

Florida

On September 8, 2008, the Florida Secretary of State instructed election officials to reject voter registration applications that do not pass an error-prone computer match process. In the first three weeks of the policy, 15% of registrations were initially bounced because of failed computer matches; election officials were able to catch and correct obvious typos in about 3/4 of these cases, but to date, here.

Wisconsin

After the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (the state's election board) rejected a proposal in July to retroactively implement a no "match, no vote" policy for all voters who registered since 2006, on September 10, the Attorney General sued the board seeking to force such a policy right before the election. The Board conducted an audit of its voter rolls and found a 22% match failure rate, including for 4 of the 6 members of the board. The court ruled on Thursday, October 23, 2008 that the attorney general had no authority to sue, however Van Hollen said he would appeal. More information can be found here.