Supressing votes in Ohio

[cindianna_jones]

This year, there are over 600,000 newly registered Ohio voters, but President Bush has asked Attorney General Mukasey to investigate as many as 200,000 of them. Why? Because Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has refused to use an "exact match" standard before adding these voters to the rolls.

What is this "exact match" standard? Basically, it works like this: After you fill out your voter registration card, a local or state employee has to type in your information to add you to the voter rolls, and check to see that you really exist, usually by verifying your driver's license number or Social Security number. And as you can imagine, sometimes there are typos or other disparities when the information gets entered and matched - for example, if your last name is "De la Rosa" and it got entered as "Delarosa", you would fail to meet the exact match standard, and your registration form would be invalid.

Secretary Brunner has refused to use this standard on the grounds that it would erroneously deprive tens or even hundreds of thousands of Ohioans of their right to vote. The Ohio GOP sued her a month ago to try and get the courts to compel her to use the exact match standard, but the Supreme Court ruled that they had no standing to make that case.

Now, President Bush is trying to run around the Supreme Court by getting the Department of Justice to intervene. On Friday, October 24th, Bush reportedly asked Attorney General Mukasey to investigate whether as many as 200,000 voters need to reconfirm their registrations before November 4th - which would almost certainly result in forcing them to vote provisionally.

I just signed a petition urging Attorney General Mukasey not to act on President Bush's sickening request. I hope you will, too.

Please have a look and take action.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/doj_oh_suppression/?r_by=-1901304-T87fiYx&rc=paste

Thanks!

Cindi

[lisagurl]

There is no doubt that Republicans have tried every dirty trick in the book to steal elections. They have redistricted and required ID as well as creating long lines, moving polling places etc. They have made the country no better than the third world. Just another reason not to vote for them.

[Sandy]

Is this what the founding fathers envisioned when they crafted the "Great Experiment" called democracy?

On a happier note, the republican governor of Florida signed an executive order extending the early voting hours to 12 hours a day from 8 hours.  The response from the RNC was "You've just delivered Florida to Obama".

Think about that.  The only way the republicans thought to be able to deliver Florida was by making it difficult for people (presumably democratic) to vote early.  Not because their candidate had a better message, or that a level playing field was the right thing to do.

Listen, I live in Chicago which is about the bluest of the blue and Chicago style machine politics is very familiar to me so I'm not some starry eyed little girl about this.  But it does strike me that if both candidates really just told the people what they stood for in practical terms and not try to tear down the other side and let the people decide, elections would be a much more pleasing process.

Also I think it says something about what the governor of Florida thinks about John McCain's chances and what being linked to bad press about election day shenanigans could do to *his* re-election bid.  Kind of reverse coat tails. 

-Sandy (I signed the petition)