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--- Begin Message --- <x-tad-bigger>Forwarded with Compliments of Government of the USA in Exile (GUSAE): Free Americans Resisting the Fourth Reich on Behalf of All Species.
</x-tad-bigger>
From: "Stephanie Sutton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: December 12, 2005 6:52:07 PM EST
To: "President, USA Exile Govt." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: FW: The End of Democracy in Ohio?
From: Ecological Options Network [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2005 10:36 AM
Subject: The End of Democracy in Ohio?
http://www.alternet.org/rights/29292/
<x-tad-bigger> The End of Democracy in Ohio?
</x-tad-bigger>
By Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman,
Free Press. Posted December 12, 2005.
New legislation passed by Ohio Republicans may just institutionalize those
famous "voting irregularities."
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 U.S. 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 U.S.,
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.
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 U.S., 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 software, 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 to 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. 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
inconceivable 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 for 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"?
____________________________
EON
The Ecological Options Network
"What's Working Where, Worldwide"
www.eon3.net
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