Voter Disenfranchisement Alive and Well in Ohio

In all the excitement about the ongoing Al Franken/Norm Coleman slugfest in Minnesota and the Mark Begich/Ted Stevens foofaraw in Alaska, political junkies have overlooked another electoral nailbiter.

In Ohio's 15th Congressional District, Republican Steve Stivers currently leads Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy by a razor-thin 149 votes.  That's fewer people than were in line in front of me on the morning of November 4th!  (When I was waiting to buy scratch tickets.)

A recount is looming, but in the meantime there is a dispute between the two sides over more than 1,000 uncounted provisional ballots.  Republicans contend that the voters who cast those blatantly broke the law and invalidated their ballots by failing to both sign and print their names at the polling place.  So they're suing to block those votes from being counted.  On the other side are the Democrats, who have this crazy notion that people's votes should count even if they didn't follow every single arcane rule on the books.

Even more infuriating is the fact that the only part of the 15th District where the sign-and-print requirement was in effect was Franklin County, which includes the city of Columbus and is strongly Democratic.

Oh yeah, and Stivers' people initially tried to file the lawsuit with the Ohio Supreme Court, which is entirely made up of Republicans.

Hooray for democracy!