With Election Day fast approaching, Republicans inside the Beltway and across the nation are bracing for massive vote-fraud allegations and a tangle of legal disputes in key swing states. Electoral officials may be facing a “perfect storm” that could throw the election outcome into a legal morass. One of their biggest headaches: the swelling ranks of voters with new addresses because of recent foreclosure proceedings. More than 2 million foreclosure proceedings are pending in the United States, according to the Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac organization. Key states such as Ohio and Florida have been especially hard hit. The prospect of a tsunami of voters with outdated addresses showing up at polling places has election officials worried. “It’s a big potential concern,” Daniel Tokaji, an Ohio State law professor and election expert, tells Newsmax. Also, officials’ ability to detect fraudulent absentee ballots from those who recently moved has never been tested as it will be this November. Several other factors raise the specter of massive balloting snafus and widespread allegations of voter fraud: The extraordinary number of newly registered voters, especially those enlisted by organizations such as ACORN with a reputation for bogus registrations. Republican Sens. John Danforth of Missouri and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, who are running the McCain-Palin 2008 Honest and Open Election Committee, say that some polling places are kept open longer on Election Day to favor one candidate intentionally over another. Danforth and Rudman also point out that voter registrations in Ohio in the last election exceeded the number of voting-age people in four counties. They ask whether that could happen again. In Nevada, nearly 1,000 felons were registered illegally in 2004. In Wisconsin, Milwaukee election officials recently turned in 32 more voter registration workers to the district attorney’s office for possible prosecution, bringing the total cases pending to 39.The Ohio secretary of state is, in effect, disenfranchising voters who relied on printed applications for absentee ballots, claiming they shouldn’t get a ballot because all of the appropriate boxes were not checked. “So we are concerned that a lot of people who want to vote absentee in Ohio are not going to be able to do so,” Danforth said. There is a growing shortage of volunteer poll workers as that group ages: In March 2002, an unprecedented number of poll workers didn’t report for work in Los Angeles County. Almost 125 precincts opened late, and one didn’t open at all. Author John Fund also reports on a ticking time bomb: Since 2000, elections offices in upwards of 70 percent to 75 percent of the nation have changed voting equipment. Kim Brace of Election Data Services warns: “Every time you make a change, it has the potential of causing problems.” Inevitably, the biggest problems occur the first time the new equipment is used, she said. A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that 40 percent of Americans believe there is either significant vote fraud or active suppression of people who want to vote. At a time of heightened security and mundane rules that require citizens to show ID to travel and even rent a video, only half the states require some form of documentation to vote. | 
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