Thursday, June 23, 2011

Come rain or snow in Ohio - or photo IDs.

ONCE UPON A TIME, it was common for Republican politicians to root for bad weather on election day because as one GOP official then confided to me, more of "the coloreds" would stay home. Times have changed, if not the bottom line. Today, thanks to the nasties in the Ohio legislature, the weather is not as crucial to trimming the voter turnout. The perps down there in Columbus - the epicenter of a lot of terrible ideas these days - have turned to less iffy ways to assure their success: under the phony rubric of voter fraud, they want all voters to arrive with photo IDs to prove that they are who they say they are, current felony laws notwithstanding.

As Sen. Keith Faber, the Celina Republican,'' put it in the Columbus Dispatch, the legislative measure is absolutely necessary because it is "relevant, topical and timely"'. And if that isn't persuasive enough to alert us to the evil of massive voter fraud, word was being passed around in the Statehouse that a guy was found to have voted twice in Cincinnati.

We are living in an age of the worst political sorcery in which a party of fake do-gooders has abandoned integrity for a reign of terror on the underclass. So would it be equally ruthless to mention that the Republicans have had their share of election fraud?

For example, Charles P.White, no less than Indiana's Republican secretary of state, has been indicted on seven felony charges involving voting.

And wasn't James Tobin, then President George W. Bush's New England campaign manager, convicted of taking part in a plot to jam Democrats' phones?

Against those exemplary events, maybe I should be a bit troubled to learn that the Cincinnati hoodwinker actually was an out-of-stater who cast a ballot in that city. And there's more: an inmate voted twice from jail. It was hardly reassuring to be told by Hamilton County elections officials that these were the only two mischievous cases out of 400,000 votes cast in the county.

By now, you can see where I am going with this report: There is no evidence of massive voter fraud in the state. The only fraud is the sustained effort to deny voting rights in order to help a political party that is too intellectually corrupt to honestly represent everyone who shows up at the polls. And too dishonest to admit the basis for their shabby schemes.



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Same thing's going on here in North Carolina. Republicans again proving their ability to ignore real problems while focusing on non-existent ones.

Anonymous said...

But here in North Carolina, the Democratic governor yesterday vetoed the legislation. We'll see if the majority Repubs can muster enough votes to override it.

Ohio, unfortunately, has Kasich...

Grumpy Abe said...

To put it mildly...

David Hess said...

Currently, Maryland authorities are investigating a plot to suppress voting in several predominantly black precincts in the last gubernatorial election. In this case, an effort was made to flood the districts with robocalls that voters need not show up at the polls because the outcome of the election was assured for the incumbent Democratic governor, Martin O'Malley. The alleged culprit in this case was a close associate of the Republican candidate, a former governor attempting to regain his seat. The former governor, of course, denies any knowledge of the scheme. If Ohio legislators want to investigate a REAL case of voter fraud, they need go no further than an inquiry of the former Republican Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, who allegedly rigged voting sites in minority precincts to discourage voting there during a recent presidential election. Numerous investigations and inquiries over the years by federal, state and local authorities -- as well as by prominent political scientists -- have overwhelmingly found that voting fraud in the United States is quite rare, amounting to less than 1 pct. of elections at all levels. Not content with the U.S. Supreme Court's efforts (in a pair of 5-4 decisions) to stack the financing of elections in favor of corporations and fat-cat contributors, the GOP is striving now to substitute the Old South's Jim Crow vote rigging (poll taxes, e.g., and literacy tests) with ID requirements that impose burdens particularly on the poor and elderly to minimize their turnout. Of all the freedoms embodied in our constitutional system of democratic government, the voting franchise is unarguably the most fundamental. Any effort to restrict it is a naked, even an unpatriotic, assault on the very Constitution that those who hold public office are sworn to uphold.