Ohio Elections Official: Judge’s Ruling Spreading ‘Chaos’:The judge had ordered the official to purge the state’s voter rolls of
See all.
Ohio’s top election official accused a federal judge Friday of injecting “disorder” into the presidential race by ordering her to purge the state’s voter rolls of potentially fraudulent voters.
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, complained that U.S. District Judge George C. Smith’s ruling on Thursday “threatens to throw Ohio’s entire statewide [voter] database … into chaos.”
“The district court’s cavalier attempt to micromanage Ohio officials’ administration of this election is breathtaking,” wrote Brunner, the defendant in a lawsuit filed by the Ohio Republican Party, in an argument to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. “The court recklessly ordered the Secretary to reprogram her statewide computer database, with no understanding of the database’s operation and even less regard for the disorder that its ill-informed order injects into the presidential election.”
On Thursday, Smith issued a court order compelling Brunner to purge Ohio’s voter rolls of fraudulent registrants or at least allow the state’s 88 counties to individually purge their portions of the state’s centralized voter registration database. Although Brunner has cross-checked the database against records from both the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security Administration, Smith ruled that she stopped short of weeding out the mismatched names.
“Defendant admitted that the county boards of election had no way to search or identify the mismatches,” Smith wrote in his order. “Defendant further indicated that the State, like the county boards of elections, at this time, also does not have the technological capabilities to run a search to identify or isolate mismatches.”
According to Smith, Brunner initially claimed she would need two or three days to program the database into compliance. But she told the appeals court Friday that it “would require at least four to five days.”
The time frame is important because Oct. 16 is the deadline for challenging the authenticity of absentee ballots in Ohio[…]