Will Republicans Use Contested Voter Registration Lists to Scare New Voters?

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court told Ohio's Republican Party it was not entitled to a list of 200,000-plus Ohioans whose voter registration information did not match Social Security and state drivers' license databases. What did the Ohio party do? It went judge shopping, filing a closely related suit before Ohio's Supreme Court. Pennsylvania's GOP filed a similar suit on Friday. In Wisconsin, litigation on this issue is ongoing.

Why are Republicans so intent on obtaining this information?

So far, most of the analysis by election law experts have focused on Election Day scenarios. They posit that Republicans could use the lists to legally challenge the credentials of new voters or a close vote count. Such challenges would cause delays at polling places. They could result in voters being given provisional ballots, which must be verified before they are counted. Fights over provisional ballots could be the 2008 version of the Florida presidential recount.

The Ohio Republican Party threw a curious wrench into this thinking on Wednesday when a spokesman said his party would not pursue voter challenges. But two days later, the state party went to Ohio's Supreme Court seeking the same lists. (It already had asked all of Ohio's 88 county election boards for the data.) This posturing would seem contradictory unless there were other plans for those lists before Election Day.

In recent weeks, the McCain-Palin campaign and Republican Party have embarked on a major media and litigation strategy to cast as much doubt as possible on the veracity of the 2008 vote. A look at the campaign's recent messaging and GOP tactics from Ohio's 2004 election suggest another use for the non-match lists: to target voters for mass phone calls, mailings, or other messaging to deter them from voting on Nov. 4.

The New York Times reported Saturday that as the Obama campaign was outspending McCain by a four-to-one ratio on television ads, the McCain campaign was making "hundreds of thousands of automated telephone calls -- uniformly negative and sometimes misleading" to voters in 10 battleground states. In these calls, the GOP linked Obama to former 1960s radicals and wealthy Hollywood politicos.

There is no reason why GOP could not use the 'no-match' voter registration lists to make similar calls to hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters in Ohio -- and other battleground states -- that call into question the legality of those voter registrations.

During the final presidential debate, McCain signaled his campaign would continue to raise this issue. Speaking of ACORN, the low-income advocacy group, he accused it of perpetuating "one of the greatest frauds of voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy in this country" because some ACORN employees turned in fabricated registrations among the 1.3 million submitted by the group.

If the Ohio Republican Party obtains the lists of 200,000-plus Ohio voters where the information on registration forms did not match state and federal databases -- even as Social Security officials have said their data could be wrong up to 28.5 percent of the time when used this way -- it could program computers to call those voters and say their registrations potentially violate laws, a deliberate exaggeration to deter turnout.

There are precedents for this tactic from the 2008 campaign as well as from Ohio in 2004.

In Philadelphia, the Daily News reported earlier this month that flyers were distributed in minority neighborhoods telling prospective voters they could be arrested while voting for outstanding traffic tickets. In 2004, members of the "Texas Strike Force," a group of GOP volunteers, used hotel pay phones in downtown Columbus, Ohio, to call likely Democratic voters and tell them that they could be arrested if they voted.