In a rejection of GOP disenfranchisement tactics, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of greater voter access for Ohio voters today. As I mentioned previously on this blog, the efforts by various states to match new registrations against state databases has been fraught with technological problems. Republican operatives have been waging a campaign in Ohio to take advantage of the glitches in the system to try to challenge every newly registered voter whose name doesn’t exactly match state records.
The GOP was requesting that Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner turn over the lists of all voters whose registration did not exactly match state records. Their intention was to challenge all of these voters at the polls, thereby requiring them to cast provisional ballots. However, the failure to match is a widespread problem that rarely has to do with voter fraud. As the New York Times points out:
In one audit of match failures in 2004 by New York City election officials, more than 80 percent of the failures were found to have resulted from errors by government officials; most of the remaining failures were because of immaterial discrepancies between the two records.
Eighteen states sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday for failing to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new vehicles. The suit comes one year after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision outlining that the EPA had the power to limit said emissions under the Clean Air Act. In addition to these 18 states, 3 cities and 11 environmental organizations have also signed onto the suit.