This week in the War on Voting: Victories in Ohio and South Carolina, Sproul still doing his thing

Federal panel tells Ohio to stop trashing provisional ballots

You would think that it would be an easy call. A poll worker informs you that you should cast your provisional ballot in a specific precinct. You do so. It turns out that it was the wrong precinct. But it's not your mistake and your vote is counted anyway.  

But that's not how it was being done in Ohio. Such "miscast" ballots, 14,000 of them in 2008, were being tossed in the circular file. In the second important Ohio-related decision in a week, a three-judge federal court panel ruled Thursday that such wrong-precinct provisional ballots must be counted when it's a poll-worker's fault they were miscast:

Ohio law 'effectively requires voters to have a greater knowledge of their precinct, precinct ballot, and polling place than poll workers,' the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit said. [...]

Ohioans cast 200,000 provisional ballots in the 2008 elections, and 14,000 of those were rejected for being cast in the wrong precinct. Given that the state increasingly uses polling locations that serve voters from more than one precinct and that 13 different classes of voters are required to use provisional ballots, the reality exists that 'thousands' of ballots would be tossed out 'where the voter's only mistake was relying on the poll-worker's precinct guidance,' the judges said.

The issue of counting out-of-precinct provisional ballots began in 2006. Ohio signed a consent decree then to resolve the issue. But the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that it was under no obligation to count such ballots.

The wrong precinct issue may not be totally resolved. The court's ruling only affects "right church, wrong pew" ballots. That is, the voter was at the right location, but voted in the wrong precinct at that location. It is not clear whether the court will clarify the matter by election day.

Last week's Sixth Circuit Court's ruling upheld a lower court's decision reinstating Ohio's early voting hours on the three days right before the election. The legislature had removed those days from the early voting calendar. Secretary of State Jon Husted has appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sproul still in the voter registration business

When it was discovered last week that more than 100 fraudulent voter-registration forms were traceable to employees of Nathan Sproul's Strategic Allied Consulting firm, the Florida Republican Party, four other state parties and the Republican National Party publicly broke off its lucrative dealings with SAC.

But now, bluenc reports, Sproul has set up another apparently identical operation called Issue Advocacy Partners, operating in 10 states. Strategic Allied Consulting itself was set up to conceal Sproul's presence because of previous voter-registration shenanigans in 2000 and 2004. It's not known if it is being paid by any Republican party organizations, state or national.

BlueNC first made the connection between Strategic Allied Consulting and a company owned by Romney consultant Nathan Sproul of Tempe, AZ, back in August after the company was found to be operating in North Carolina. When fraudulent voter registrations associated with Strategic Allied Consulting popped up in Palm Beach last week the Florida GOP fired the firm and the operation quickly unravelled.

But even as Bradblog, Lee Fang at The Nation and ultimately Michael Isikoff at NBC were spreading the word that led to the Republican sacking of Sproul's operation, he  was already recruiting for the new operation with ads on Craigslist:

Some of the ads specifically mention voter registration but do use terms like "seeking to hire grassroots canvassers to identify conservative voters", "voter recruiter", "conservative voter identification", "voter ID", " identify conservative voters". Many of the postings use an email address with the domain issueadvocacypartners.com. The website located at issueadvocacypartners.com has an appearance that is almost identical to that of the original strategicalliedconsulting.com.

Ads for the organization have appeared in Alabama, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, New York and New Jersey.

(Please continue reading about voter suppression below the fold.)