Republicans challenge Ohio voters

Mr Obama has a narrow lead in Ohio boosted by new voters

More than 200,000 registered voters in Ohio may be challenged over their right to vote in the presidential election.

An appeal court has backed a complaint brought by the Ohio Republican Party, which argued the voters' details did not match federal records.

Their concern is over registered voters backing Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama for president.

A key Democratic official says she is concerned the move is a veiled bid to disenfranchise voters.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, said that although there were 200,000 cases where voter registration did not match social security or motor vehicle registration records, the majority of the cases were mis-spellings or inaccuracies in data bases.

"Federal government red tape, mis-stated technical information or glitches in databases should not be the basis for voters having to cast provisional ballots," she said.

Provisional ballots

The Federal Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, has ordered Ms Brunner to supply the 88 county election boards in Ohio a full list of electors where there is a data mis-match by Friday.

The county boards would then have the right to insist that these voters cast provisional ballots which could be challenged by either side after the election, unless they could establish that they were bona-fide voters.

The Ohio Republican chairman, Robert T. Bennett, called the court ruling "a victory for the integrity of Ohio's election".

The process could cause considerable delays on election day, according to officials for Cuyahoga County, which includes Ohio's largest city, Cleveland.

"It's clearly going to have an impact in regard to resources we have to expend to resolve discrepancies," said Jeff Hastings, chairman of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

"We've had about 100,000 (registrations) since January and of those about 34,000 since the primaries."

Further challenges

The Republican Party said it would also seek to challenge the ballots of those newly registered voters who have already voted by absentee ballot.

It said it was writing to the country election boards to ask to see the written records of all 13,000 new voters who had taken advantage of a one-day window to vote early.

"We've seen reports of fraudulent registrations, and we want to see those forms first-hand," said Jason Mauk, the state Republican Party executive director.

Meanwhile, the Ohio state attorney general has asked the US Supreme Court to overturn the Ohio court ruling, saying it will disrupt preparations for the election.

The case will initially be considered by Justice John Paul Stevens, who oversees the Sixth Circuit, and who could decide whether to bring the matter to the full court.

Earlier in the year, the Supreme Court upheld a tough voter registration law in Indiana which had been challenged by the Democrats.

Close battle

The winner of the 2008 election is likely to be the candidate who is most successful at getting their voters to the polls.

The Obama campaign, in particular, has invested heavily in a voter registration drive to sign up new voters drawn from the ranks of its supporters, such as young people.

And they appear to have managed to increase the number of newly registered Democrats significantly in a number of key swing states in addition to Ohio, such as Colorado, Virginia, and North Carolina.

So any further legal challenges to their right to vote could have a big effect on the election outcome if the contest is close.

In the 2000 US election, disputed ballots in Florida led to an election deadlock that was only resolved by the Supreme Court.