If it's Wednesday it must mean there's been a new hiccup with voting in Ohio. The AP has the latest:
A federal appeals court on Tuesday ordered Ohio's top elections official to set up a system by Friday to verify the eligibility of newly registered voters and make the information available to the state's 88 county election boards.The full 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati upheld a lower court ruling that Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner must use other government records to check thousands of new voters for registration fraud.
A three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit had disagreed last week. The full court's ruling, in which nine of 16 judges concurred, overturns that decision.
Ohio Republicans had sued Brunner, a Democrat. Her spokesman had no immediate comment Tuesday.
About 666,000 Ohioans have registered to vote since January, with many doing so before the contested Democratic presidential primary election last March between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. The presidential election is Nov. 4.
Since the primary, Ohio Republicans have filed a series of challenges to the registrations and Brunner's administration of election rules. They have helped voters file lawsuits against local boards of election over registration rules, absentee ballot requests and a weeklong period that allowed registration and voting on the same day.
Brunner previously said sufficient systems exist to verify new voter registrations and there was no way to set up the court-ordered system with such speed.
Last week, the three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit had sided with Brunner, but the full panel sided with the GOP and U.S. District Judge George C. Smith in Columbus after hearing an appeal. Smith had ordered Brunner to develop a way to verify voter registration information and make it available to local election boards.
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