Overt Discrimination in Ohio
August 14, 2012 390 Comments
Quick!
Guess which party is responsible for the discrimination.
Update: On Wednesday afternoon, Jon Husted, the Ohio Secretary of State, announced that all Ohio counties would follow a uniform early-voting policy. The policy would extend early-voting hours to 7 p.m. on weekdays during the last two weeks before the election, though all early voting is banned during the final three days of the campaign.
Taking Note: Equal (Voting) Consideration (August 15, 2012)
Taking Note: Early Voting in Ohio (August 6, 2012)
Campaign Stops: Voter Suppression and Political Polls(August 1, 2012)
If you live in Butler or Warren counties in the Republican-leaning suburbs of Cincinnati, you can vote for president beginning in October by going to a polling place in the evening or on weekends. Republican officials in those counties want to make it convenient for their residents to vote early and avoid long lines on Election Day.
But, if you live in Cincinnati, you’re out of luck. Republicans on the county election board are planning to end early voting in the city promptly at 5 p.m., and ban it completely on weekends,according to The Cincinnati Enquirer. The convenience, in other words, will not be extended to the city’s working people.
The sleazy politics behind the disparity is obvious. Hamilton County, which contains Cincinnati, is largely Democratic and voted solidly for Barack Obama in 2008. So did the other urban areas of Cleveland, Columbus and Akron, where Republicans, with the assistance of the Ohio secretary of state, Jon Husted, have already eliminated the extended hours for early voting.
County election boards in Ohio, a closely contested swing state, are evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. In counties likely to vote for President Obama, Republicans have voted against the extended hours, and Mr. Husted has broken the tie in their favor. (He said the counties couldn’t afford the long hours.) In counties likely to vote for Mitt Romney, Republicans have not objected to the extended hours.
This is just the latest alarming example of how Republicans across the country are trying to manipulate the electoral system by blocking the voting rights of their opponents. These actions have a disproportionate effect on blacks, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities who struggled for so long to participate in American democracy.
Cincinnati, for example, is 45 percent black, and Cleveland 53 percent. Butler County, however, is 8 percent black, and Warren 3.5 percent. This kind of racial disparity is clearly visible wherever Republicans have trampled on voting rights during Mr. Obama’s term.
In Florida, more than half of black voters went to the polls early in 2008 largely to support Mr. Obama. So, last year, Republican lawmakers there severely curtailed the early voting period. In Pennsylvania and other states that have imposed strict voter ID requirements, the impact will be felt hardest by blacks, Hispanics, older citizens and students, all of whom tend to lack government ID cards at a higher rate than the general population. At the trial in Pennsylvania over the constitutionality of the state’s voter ID law, the plaintiffs introduced clear evidence, compiled by a geographic data analysis firm, that registered voters in Philadelphia who lack government ID cards are concentrated in minority and low-income areas.
In Ohio, as in other states, the Republican Party is establishing a reputation for putting short-term political gain ahead of the most fundamental democratic rights.
390 Comments
Since when was it ever the responsibility of society to basically compel a vote from someone who had something more important to her to do than vote on a date and during times that are known well in advance, and that have been traditional since our founding? Compel the vote by spending whatever sums are necessary to actually place the ballot under someone's nose and asking her to press a button?
If you had the numbers to successfully impose YOUR view of what is right, that voting should be made as simplistic and trivial an exercise as possible because those who probably would likely vote under such a regime and might not under a more traditional one also most likely would vote Democratic; then, you wouldn't have the need to editorialize on the victory of those who disagree with you and obviously DO have numbers behind them.
Until you get the numbers, you're merely arguing for your sense of what's "right", with people who have a different sense of what's "right"; and, currently, your adversaries outnumber you.
Maybe rather than abolishing the special scrutiny laws that were imposed on the South under the Voting Rights Act, as Republicans and conservatives like Scalia advocate, we should instead extend them to cover the entire nation. Racism is alive and well throughout America, not just in the former Confederacy, and the Justice Department should have the power to overturn discriminatory policies like these.
''Voting is the heart of democracy.
Yet today, our voting systems are deeply flawed. We boast the world’s oldest representative government, but barely half of all Americans vote. Over the past century, our nation expanded the right to vote and knocked down myriad barriers to full electoral participation. Starting in 2011, however, that momentum abruptly shifted.
State governments across the country enacted an array of new laws that could make it significantly harder for as many as 5 million eligible Americans to vote. Some states require voters to show government-issued photo identification, often of a type that as many as one in ten voters do not have. Other states have cut back on early voting, a hugely popular innovation used by millions of Americans. Still others made it much more difficult for citizens to register to vote, a prerequisite for voting.
These new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority, elderly, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities.''
The Founders were mostly landowners and, accordingly, restricted voting rights in ways that we have since changed. As the Pennsylvania case illustrates, the new movement to restrict voting rights has nothing to do with any proven abuse--the Commonwealth presented no evidence that fraud had or would occur.
The new laws are just an effort to keep the less privileged from exercising their most basic American right. It is the return of Jim Crow.
Even in areas of the white-collar sector, the nine-to-five job is a quaint relic of the past. For some white-collar workers, the work day plus commute can easily extend from 6 AM to 9 PM.
And we wonder why turnout is often less than fifty percent, especially in mid-term elections?
Voting on a work day disenfranchises a large segment of our working population. Most advanced countries have weekend voting and we should follow suit.
There is an organization that is working to establish weekend and extended voting in the U.S.A. It's called "Why Tuesday?" For information on how to get involved in the fight to make it easier for working people to vote, visit:
http://www.whytuesday.org/.
Some of the shenanigans I've been witness to:
1. There typically aren't enough functioning voting machines in the districts where they wanted to suppress the vote, so that in suburban precincts voting takes 15 minutes while in urban precincts and college towns voting takes 3-4 hours.
2. In 2004 Diebold Election Systems, makers of the electronic voting systems used throughout Ohio, promised the electoral votes in Ohio to George W Bush. The voting machines registered about 5% more support for Bush than exit polling did, which was highly suspicious to say the least.
3. Voter registration forms from Democratic-leaning districts and organizations were rejected by the Secretary of State's office because they used the wrong kind of paper. They didn't notify prospective voters of this decision. Similar forms from right-wing fundamentalist church groups were accepted.
4. In 2008, voter registration forms from some Democratic-leaning organizations such as Acorn were rejected because there were obviously fraudulent forms (e.g. voter name: Mickey Mouse) mixed in with the real forms. The reason Acorn had submitted these, though, was that state law required them to do so.
5. During spot-check audits in 2008, election officials sorted the ballots before counting them to make sure that they came up with the right answer.
Those who are doing this completely understand that in a state with razor-thin electoral margins, chipping away 2-4% of the vote by the other side is all you need to win.
Both parties have played these games in Ohio for years, and I suspect the same is done in other states as well. What's weird is that the Democratic Party did not object to keeping the long early voting in Warren and Butler Counties - objecting would have forced Sec. of State Husted to limit voting hours in those counties as well.
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