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The end of democracy in Ohio?
AlterNet: The End of Democracy in Ohio? 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. ...
It's no coincidence that the Republican Party -- first in Texas, now in Ohio, soon in Georgia and Indiana -- are pushing the most anti-democratic measures in decades.
December 12, 2005 at 06:15 PM in Politics | Permalink
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Comments
For those who want to read more for themselves...
http://www.legislature.state.oh.us/bills.cfm?ID=126_HB_3
Interesting observation by the OSCE (European agency evaluating democratic elections worldwide)
http://www.osce.org/documents/odihr/2004/11/3779_en.pdf
...Identification is a rule rather than the exception in most OSCE countries. Canadians, you know... the progressive country some Americans love to love, look upon the parts of the US that don't have strict photo ID requirements as entirely foolish and wonder why we can't see the plain and simple solution to voting irregularities staring us in the face.
A few other points...
1. The law also makes paper trails mandatory for electronic devices.
2. Look at California for a gerrymandered state run by Democrats. Do you know that in California we count illegal aliens in evaluating voting districts? That results in a wide discrepancy in how much a vote is worth across the state.
3. It doesn't make it illegal to challenge any federal election in Ohio - it says that such challenges must happen in federal courts.
So, given your emphasis on ID requirements in this posting as being undemocratic , are you saying that Europe and Canada are undemocratic? I double dog dare you.
How about the Alternet article being precisely 180 degrees wrong. ID requirements will mean no more questions about vote legitimacy (you know, like dead democrats voting)
Posted by: Alan McCann at Dec 12, 2005 9:43:58 PM
