Judge rules for provisional ballots

From combined dispatches

A federal judge ignored a Justice Department argument yesterday and ruled that Michigan must count provisional ballots cast by voters who show up at the wrong polling precincts but are in the right city, township or village.

U.S. District Judge David Lawson issued an injunction barring Republican Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land from ordering election officials not to count provisional ballots unless voters are shown to have voted in the right precinct.

Provisional, or backup, ballots are used when voters say they are properly registered but their names do not appear on the voter registration rolls.

Judge Lawson agreed with Michigan Democrats, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and voter-rights groups who filed suit against Mrs. Land. They said it should be enough that voters cast ballots in the jurisdiction — city, township or village — where they live, regardless of whether they show up in the correct precinct.

His ruling echoed one last week by a federal judge in Ohio.

The Justice Department had argued in a friend-of-the-court brief Monday that the 2002 Help America Vote Act does not give persons the right to sue if they believe their state has violated the law. Rather, they should go through a state administrative complaint process or rely on a U.S. attorney to file suit, the federal government said.

“American elections have long been precinct-based,” Justice Department attorneys wrote in court papers. “A well-understood premise of such a system is that a voter must appear at the correct polling place — the one to which the voter was assigned, and on whose rolls the voter appears — or else the voter will not be able to vote.”

Mark Brewer, chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, had said the department’s “11th-hour request reeks of partisan mischief and is an abuse of our justice system.”

Elsewhere, the Florida Supreme Court ruled Monday that people who cast provisional ballots at the wrong precinct are not entitled to have their votes counted, rejecting an argument that the rule wrongly disenfranchises voters. The court said the law clearly states provisional ballots must be counted only if the voter is shown later to be entitled to vote at the precinct.

However, a federal judge in Ohio last week blocked a directive requiring poll workers to send voters to their correct precincts, ruling that Ohio voters can cast provisional ballots as long as they are in the county where they are registered. Ohio’s secretary of state is appealing.

Also in Ohio, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie yesterday joined his state party counterpart, Bob Bennett, in a media campaign to counter voter registration fraud.

“The reports of voter fraud in Ohio are some of the most alarming in the nation,” Mr. Gillespie said.

Mr. Bennett said the state party will take out a full-page ad in some major Ohio newspapers this week urging residents to report voter fraud suspicions to their county boards of elections.

He said groups such as America Coming Together and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now have done registration work that is “sloppy, haphazard and, in some cases, downright illegal” in a bid to defeat President Bush. He noted that “the Democrats are conveniently silent” about the fraud accusations.

The Montgomery County Board of Elections in Dayton, Ohio, yesterday said it would turn over to the sheriff’s office two apparent cases of voter fraud, one involving the attempted registration of a dead man.

The Republican officials recapped a list of charges of voter registration fraud in traditionally Democratic precincts. Among them: an attempt to register a dead man near Cleveland and Monday’s arrest in Defiance, Ohio, of a man accused of falsifying more than 100 registration cards with such names as “Dick Tracy” and “Mary Poppins” in exchange for crack cocaine.