This week in the War on Voting

Fixing Democracy: At the Brennan Center for Justice, Erik Opsal has written an essay that includes three prescriptions for improving governance: modernize voter registration, ditch the filibuster and combat the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court that has made money an even bigger factor in elections. On the first matter, he writes:

America's voter registration system is ramshackle. It's straight out of the 19th century, relying on paper forms to register voters. If a voter registers at the DMV, they have to fill out a form, that form is mailed to an election office, and a county official types it into a database. This is not only inefficient and costly, it's prone to inaccuracy. One mistyped letter or number and a citizen can show up on Election Day and not be able to vote. Not only does it prevent that one voter from having their say, it also affects others by causing bottlenecks and long lines at the polls.

It is time to harness new technology to modernize our voting system, which would add more than 50 million eligible Americans to the rolls, permanently. The Brennan Center's modernization proposal would use existing computerized lists to pass names of eligible voters from state agencies on to election officials. Citizens could also register or update their registration online or at the polls, and registrations would move with a voter when they move within a state. In recent years, at least 21 states ' without fanfare and in a bipartisan way ' have implemented parts of this proposal.

Ohio's Jon Husted at it again on provisional ballots: Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted will probably get an award from the Heritage Foundation or the Koch brothers or somebody of that ideological texture for being a model of voting suppression over the past 14 months. If it could keep Democrats away from the polls, he tried it.

Unsuccessfully in the big leagues, as it turns out. Obama and Sen. Sherrod Brown both won their races. But down-ticket there are still contests to be decided, and Democrats are accusing Husted of tossing out provisional ballots that might cost two Democrats seats in the Ohio state legislature.

Among the many reasons, provisional ballots are cast in cases when a voter has changed a home address and moved to a new precinct or county, among other reasons. A federal court ruled before the election that the state must count the votes of citizens who cast provisional ballots in the wrong precinct because of a pollworker's erroneous instructions. Democrats think that approach should apply to other matters, too. But the conservative Sixth Circuit Court overturned that rule.

Automatic recounts are going in two counties'Tuscarawas and Cuyahoga'where Republican incumbents lead Democratic challengers by a few hands full of votes. If Democrats lose these two races, the Republicans will have large enough majorities in both chambers of the legislature to place constitutional amendments on the ballot without the need to attract a single Democratic vote. In Tuscarawas County, 114 provisional ballots have been tossed out, and in Cuyahoga County race 270 have been. Democratic Rep. Debbie Phillips said that pollworkers were given were given plain brown manila envelopes instead of the official provisional ballot envelopes'part of which must be completed by the voter or the ballot won't be counted.Democrats say Husted is also tossing out ballots citizens cast at their former precinct even if they live in the same county and congressional district. That violates the 1993 "motor voter" act.

Ohio has the highest count of provisional ballots in the country, more than 200,000 this year, concentrated in urban areas that are heavily Democratic. In 2008, one in five provisional ballots was tossed out.

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