Ohio GOP Plan Holiday Burial For US Democracy8 December 2005
With New Legislation, Ohio Republicans Plan
Holiday Burial For American Democracy
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
December
6, 2005
From:
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1607
A
law that will make democracy all but moot in Ohio is about
to pass the state legislature and to be signed by its
Republican governor. Despite massive corruption scandals
besieging the Ohio GOP, any hope that the Democratic party
could win this most crucial swing state in future
presidential elections, or carry its pivotal US Senate seat
in 2006, are about to end.
House Bill 3 has already
passed the Ohio House of Representatives and is about to be
approved by the Republican-dominated Senate, probably
before the holiday recess. Republicans dominate the Ohio
legislature thanks to a heavily gerrymandered crazy quilt
of rigged districts, and to a moribund Ohio Democratic
party. The GOP-drafted HB3 is designed to all but obliterate
any possible future Democratic revival. Opposition from the
Ohio Democratic Party, where it exists at all, is diffuse
and ineffectual.
HB3's most publicized provision will
require positive identification before casting a vote. But
it also opens voter registration activists to partisan
prosecution, exempts electronic voting machines from public
scrutiny, quintuples the cost of citizen- requested
statewide recounts and makes it illegal to challenge a
presidential vote count or, indeed, any federal election
result in Ohio. When added to the recently passed HB1,
which allows campaign financing to be dominated by the
wealthy and by corporations, and along with a Rovian wish
list of GOP attacks on the ballot box, democracy in Ohio
could be all but over.
The GOP is ramming similar bills
through state legislatures around the US, starting with
Georgia and Indiana. The ID requirements in particular have
provoked widespread opposition from newspapers such as the
New York Times. The Times, among others, argues that the ID
requirements and the costs associated with them, constitute
an unconstitutional discriminatory poll tax.
ADVERTISEMENT
But despite
significant court challenges, the Republicans are forcing
changes in long-standing election laws that have allowed
citizens to vote based on their signature alone. Across the
US, GOP Jim Crow laws will eliminate millions of Democratic
voters from the registration rolls. In swing states like
Ohio, such ballots are almost certain to be crucial.
The
proposed Ohio law will demand a valid photo ID or a utility
bill, a bank statement, a paycheck or a government document
with a current address. Thousands of Ohio citizens who are
elderly, homeless, unemployed or who do not drive will be
effectively disenfranchised. Many citizens, for example,
rent apartments where the utilities are paid by landlords.
In such cases, the number of people living in
utilities-included apartment rentals could actually
determine an election.
During the 2004 presidential
election, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, J. Kenneth
Blackwell, also issued statewide threats against ex-felons
and people whose names resembled those of ex-felons.
Thousands of such threats were delivered to registered
voters who were never convicted of anything, or who were
eligible to vote after being released from prison. In 2004 a
"Mighty Texas Strike Force" came to Columbus with a
specific mandate to threaten ex-felons with arrest if they
dared to vote.
It is legal for ex-felons in Ohio to vote,
even if they are in half-way houses or on parole. But HB3's
identification requirement, combined with the confusion
Blackwell has introduced into the process, will intimidate
such Ohioans from voting in 2006 and beyond.
HB3 will
also reduce voter rolls by ordering county boards of
elections to send cards to registered voters every two
years. If a card comes back as undelivered, the voter must
rely on a provisional ballot. But tens of thousands of
provisional ballots were arbitrarily discarded in 2004, and
some 16,000 are known to remain uncounted to this day.
HB3 also imposes severe restrictions on voter
registration drives. It allows the state attorney-general
and local prosecutors wide powers to prosecute vaguely
defined charges of fraud against those working to sign up
voters. The restrictions are clearly meant to chill the
kind of Democratic registration drives that brought hundreds
of thousands of new voters to the polls in 2004 (even
though many were turned away in Democratic wards due to a
lack of voting machines).
Those electronic machines will
also be exempted from recounts by random sampling, even in
close, disputed elections like those of 2000 and 2004.
In 2004, scores of Ohio voters reported, under oath, that
they had pressed John Kerry's name on touchscreen machines,
only to see George W. Bush's name light up. A board of
elections technician in Mahoning County (Youngstown) has
admitted that at least 18 machines there suffered such
problems. Sworn testimony in Columbus indicates that votes
for Kerry faded off the screen on touchscreen machines
there. Other charges of mis-programming, re-programming,
recalibrating, mishandling and manipulation of electronic
voting hardware and memory cards have since arisen
throughout Ohio 2004.
For the 2005 election, some 41
additional Ohio counties (of 88) were switched to Diebold
touchscreen machines. Despite polls showing overwhelming
voter approval, two electoral reform issues went down
improbable defeat. Issue Two, meant to make voting easier,
and Issue Three, on campaign finance reform, were shown by
highly reliable Columbus Dispatch polls to be passing
handily.
The Dispatch was within 0.5% on Issue One, a
bond issue, and has rarely been significantly wrong in its
many decades of Ohio polling. And even opponents of Issues
Two and Three conceded that they were highly likely to pass.
On the Sunday before the Tuesday 2005 election, the
Dispatch predicted Issue Two would pass by a vote of 59% to
33%, with about 8% undecided. But Tuesday's official vote
count showed Issue Two failing with just 36.5% in favor and
63.5% opposed. For that to have happened, the Dispatch had
to have been wrong on Issue Two's support by more than 20
points. Nearly half those who said they would support Issue
Two would have had to vote against it, along with all the
undecideds.
The numbers on Issue Three are equally
startling. The Dispatch showed it winning with 61%, to just
25% opposed and some 14% undecided. Instead just 33% of the
votes were counted in its favor, with 67% opposed, an almost
incomprehensible weekend turnaround.
No other numbers
were comparable on November 8, 2005, or elsewhere in the
recent history of Dispatch polling. The startling outcome
has thus raised even more suspicion and doubt about the use
of electronic voting and tabulating machines in Ohio, which
account where virtually 100% of the state's vote count.
The federal General Accountability Office (GAO) has
recently issued a major report confirming that tampering
with and manipulating such machines can be easily done by a
very small number of people. Charges are widespread that
this is precisely what gave George W. Bush Ohio's electoral
votes, and thus the presidency, in 2004, not to mention the
suspicious referenda outcomes in 2005.
HB3 will make it
virtually impossible for any challenge to be mounted
involving any votes cast or counted on electronic machines
or tabulators---meaning virtually every vote cast in Ohio.
Indeed, HB3 will raise the cost of mounting a recount
from $10 per precinct to $50 per precinct. In 2004,
Secretary of State Blackwell forced citizen groups to raise
private funds for a recount, which he proceeded to sabotage.
The process, which became a futile electronic charade, cost
donors committed to democracy more than $100,000. Three
partial, meaningless faux recounts resulted. To date more
than 100,000 votes cast in Ohio remain uncounted, including
some 93,000 easily-read machine-rejected ballots. .
During the 2004 election process Blackwell, manipulated
the number of precincts in Ohio, and issued inaccurate
information about their location and boundaries, making a
meaningful precise number hard to come by. But with more
than 10,000 precincts still in existence, HB3 would make
funding an attempt at another recount in 2006 or 2008 cost
more than $500,000.
Such an effort might also result in
official retaliation. In 2004, Blackwell and Ohio
Attorney-General Jim Petro---both of whom are now
Republican candidates for governor---tried to impose stiff
financial sanctions against attorneys who filed a legal
challenge to the seating of the Ohio electors who gave
George W. Bush the presidency. The Ohio Supreme Court
disallowed the sanctions after the challenge was withdrawn.
But HB3 would make such a federal election challenge illegal
altogether.
With the electoral process in Ohio all but
disemboweled, those hoping for a change of party in upcoming
state and national elections are probably kidding
themselves.
The 2004 election in the Buckeye state was
riddled with deception, fraud, intimidation, manipulation
and outright theft, all of which were essential to the
triumph of George W. Bush. In 2005, four electoral reform
ballot initiatives were allegedly defeated despite huge
poll margins showing the almost certain passage of two of
them. The most credible explanation for their defeat lies
in electronic manipulation of voting machines, tabulators
and memory cards which the GAO confirms have no credible
security safeguards.
With campaign finance, voter
registration, electronic voting, public recounts, district
gerrymandering and overall electoral administration now
firmly in the pocket of the GOP, and with Democratic
opposition that is virtually non-existent on the issue of
vote fraud and election manipulation, there is little reason
to believe the Republican grip on Ohio will be loosened at
any point in the near future.
In traditional terms, the
scandal-ridden Ohio GOP would appear to be more vulnerable
than ever. Governor Robert Taft has become the only Ohio
governor to be convicted of a crime while in office. With an
astonishing 7% approval rating, he has been compared to
Homer Simpson by the state's leading Republican newspaper.
Republican US Senator Mike DeWine appears highly
vulnerable. The GOP has never won the White House without
winning the Buckeye State.
But HB3 will solidify the
GOP's iron grip on the electronic voting process and all
that surrounds it. Unless they break that grip, Democrats
who believe they can carry any part of Ohio in 2006 or 2008
are kidding themselves.
When it comes to 2008, can you
say "Jeb Bush"?
*************
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are
co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS
RIGGING 2008, available at
www.Freepress.org. Their WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO, written
with Steve Rosenfeld, will be published by the New Press in
2006. Fitrakis was one of the attorneys targeted by
Blackwell and Petro in 2004.
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