COLUMBUS, OH – A coalition of voting and civil rights groups sent a letter to Hamilton County special prosecutor Michael O’Neill today, urging him to suspend his “troubling” investigation into hundreds of county voters who lawfully registered and cast absentee ballots during Ohio’s five-day window of same day registration and voting.
Signed by representatives of several organizations including Project Vote, the ACLU Voting Rights Project, Demos, and the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights Under the Law, the letter expresses deep concern that the Hamilton County has “launched this investigation without any evidence or credible allegation.” “Such an investigation,” the letter continues, “would threaten the federally protected rights of Hamilton County voters under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the United States Constitution.”
“Law enforcement officials investigating Americans for nothing more than exercising their legal right to vote is a voter suppression tactic that we thought we’d seen the last of in the 1960s,” says Project Vote counsel Teresa James, one of the letter’s signatories. “There has been no documented allegation that fraud occurred, let alone any credible evidence. This is an obvious overreaching of the authority of the prosecutor’s office, and a gross and egregious abuse of power.”
Despite recent rulings from four different federal and state courts upholding the lawfulness of Ohio’s five-day window, from September 30 to October 5, in which voters could register and cast an absentee ballot on the same day, county prosecutor Joe Deters initiated a grand jury investigation and issued subpoenas for unredacted personal information on 40% of the 671 new voters who cast ballots between Sept. 30, when absentee voting began, and Oct. 6, when voter registration ended.
Deters, who also serves as Southwest Ohio chair of the McCain-Palin campaign, removed his office from the investigation amid accusations that the investigation was partisan in nature, and asked that a special prosecutor, O’Neill, be appointed. O’Neill, a Republican, formerly worked for Deters, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
According to the letter, Deters’ justification for targeting these voters for investigation was based on the claim that “he conducted some version of a database match and determined that 100 registrants did not match the addresses in other databases, and another 166 could not be found in whatever database was used.” As the letter points out, even official database matching is notoriously unreliable: “As you are undoubtedly aware, there are many reasons for which such database mismatches – through no fault of the voter – would yield unreliable results and cannot serve as the sole basis for questioning a voter’s eligibility.” This fact was recognized by the Ohio Secretary of State in a statement on Oct. 14, 2008.
The Hamilton County election board says the complaints of fraud did not come from local election officials, and a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office says they are “unaware of any specific allegations of illegal voting out of that county.”
“I can’t get past the feeling that this is just a partisan thing,” Tim Burke, a member of the Hamilton County Board of Elections told the Enquirer.”I just don’t believe this is anything but partisan politics.” According to a story that paper today, Burke has argued that by state law, any investigation of voter registrations should initiate from the board of elections. Gov. Ted Strickland has accused Republicans of trying “to instill fear in Ohio voters” and distract voters from the economy and other issues.
This is not the first time in recent weeks that Ohio law enforcement officers have taken it upon themselves to investigate voters who did nothing more than avail themselves of their legal rights to register and cast a ballot. Less than two weeks ago Gene Fischer, the sheriff of Greene County, Ohio, announced he was “seeking information” about hundreds of people who registered to vote and cast a ballot during Ohio’s five-day window of same day registration and voting. Following public outcry and media attention, the Greene County prosecutor’s office announced that that investigation had been cancelled.
Voting rights groups fear that such partisan fishing expeditions by law enforcement could intimidate voters and have a chilling effect on participation. According to the letter, the Hamilton County investigation may constitute unlawful intimidation under Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), and a potential violation of the criminal prohibitions of Section 12 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993, which provides for criminal penalties against any person who intimidates or attempts to intimidate any person for registering to vote, voting, or attempting to register or vote.
The letter, which is being copied to the U.S. Justice Department, the Ohio Attorney General, and the Ohio Secretary of State, cites a prior case, dating to the civil rights era in Alabama, in which law enforcement officials were found to have engaged in unlawful intimidation by following persons on their way home from a voter registration meeting and arresting them for actual traffic violations. In the current case, the letter informs O’Neill, “it is not clear that there is even the pretext that your investigation is based on some independent law enforcement justification.”
“Moreover,” the letter continues, “we believe that an investigation of persons based on nothing more than their exercise of their right to register and vote also violates their constitutional rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”
James says the investigation is an egregious assault on civil rights and a clear violation of the VRA and NVRA. “This is reminiscent of voter suppression tactics used in the deep south to intimidate and disenfranchise voters during the birth of the voter registration movement,” says James. “Americans cannot be subject to ‘investigation’ for doing nothing more than exercising their legal right to vote.”