by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
Published in The Free Press, February 1, 2006
Ohio’s GOP-controlled legislature has passed a repressive new law that
will gut free elections here and is already surfacing elsewhere around
the US. The bill will continue the process of installing the GOP as
America’s permanent ruling party.
Coming with the swearing in of right-wing extremist Supreme Court
Justice Samuel Alito, it marks another dark day for what remains of
American democracy.
Called HB3, the law now demands discriminatory voter ID,
severely cripples the possibility of statewide recounts and actually
ends the process of state-based challenges to federal elections—most
importantly for president—held within the state.
In other words, the type of legal challenge mounted to the theft of
Ohio’s electoral votes in the 2004 election will now be all but
impossible in the future.
Section 35-05.18 of HB3 requires restrictive identification
requirements for anyone trying to vote in an Ohio election. Photo ID, a
utility bill, a bank statement, a government check or other government
document showing the name and current address of the voter will be
required.
This requirement is perfectly designed to slow down the voting process
in inner city precincts. It allows Republican “challengers” to
intimidate anyone who turns up to vote in heavily Democratic precincts.
It virtually eliminates the homeless, elderly and impoverished from the
voting rolls. Election protection advocates estimate this requirement
will erase 100,000 to 200,000 voters in a typical statewide election.
By way of reference, George W. Bush allegedly carried Ohio—and the
presidency—by less than 119,000 votes in 2004.
The ID requirement is the direct result of intervention by two
high-powered Republican attorneys with ties to the White House and
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). Congressman Bob Ney
allowed the Bush-Cheney re-election national counsel Mark “Thor” Hearne
to testify last March as a so-called “voting rights advocate.” Hearne,
whose resume shows no connection to voting rights organizations, was
responsible for advising the Bush-Cheney campaign on national
litigation and election law strategy during the 2004 election. See:
http://www.lathropgage.com/people/bio.aspx?bioid=8185 and
http://www.lathropgage.com/
files/tbl_s47Details
%5CFileUpload265%5C351
%5CTHOR_Insert.pdf.
Hearne, with the help of Republican attorney Alex Vogel, concocted a
story that the problem with the 2004 elections in Ohio was the NAACP
paying people with crack cocaine to register voters. Vogel’s front
group, the Free Enterprise Coalition, even indemnified a local
Republican operative, Mark Rubrick, to file an Ohio corrupt practices
act suit against the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, ACT-Ohio and ACORN, The suit
was later quietly withdrawn after discovery showed that the operatives
behind it were linked to the top levels of the Republican Party.
Ironically, the Republican Party engaged in racist and massive voter
repression in Ohio and are now institutionalizing that very Jim
Crow-style repression and selling it as an election reform bill.
HB3 also ends the ability of the public to conduct meaningful audits of
voting machines. Election protection activists recently forced the
adoption of an auditable paper trail into the Ohio election process. In
a state where virtually all ballots are cast and/or counted on
electronic equipment, this cuts to the core of the ability to monitor
an election’s outcome. The new provision in HB3 will make the paper
trail virtually meaningless.
HB3 further imposes a huge jump in the cost of forcing a recount. In
2004, the charge was $10 per precinct, with some 11,366 precincts in
the state. Thus the Green and Libertarian Parties, which paid for it,
had to pay somewhat more than $113,660. Now the charge will be $50 per
precinct, jumping the charge to some $568,300.
Finally, and perhaps most astonishingly, HB3 eliminates the state
statutes that have allowed citizens to challenge the outcome of federal
elections within the state. After the 2004 election, election
protection advocates filed a challenge to Bush’s victory. Their
attorneys were attacked with an official attempt to levy sanctions, and
then were thwarted from an effective suit when GOP Secretary of State
J. Kenneth Blackwell locked up the state’s voter records.
But HB3 would now entirely eliminate any possibility of a state-based
legal challenge. The only alleged recourse for those wishing to
officially question the vote count in a presidential, US Senate or US
Congressional race in Ohio would be at the United States Congress.
There is now no recourse whatsoever on the state level.
Despite grassroots protests and bitter opposition from Common Cause,
the League of Women Voters and other pro-democracy groups, HB3 passed
with only one Republican vote against it (all Ohio Democratic Senators
and Representatives voted against).
So the Ohio GOP has taken another giant step toward ending the
possibility of any other party ever taking power in the Buckeye State.
When combined with new campaign finance laws that allow huge chunks of
private and corporate money to flow virtually unregulated into GOP
coffers, HB3 may have all but ended free elections in Ohio—at least
until election protection forces can somehow reverse the trend. .
Since the Civil War, only one presidential candidate—John F. Kennedy
in 1960—has won the White House without carrying Ohio. This and the
other repressive legislation passed by the Ohio GOP will make it
virtually impossible for anyone but a Republican to carry the Buckeye
State in future statewide and federal elections.
Bills like HB3 are also being lined up to flow through
Republican-controlled legislatures throughout the US, including a very
similar one in Georgia. “This comes straight from Karl Rove,” says
Cliff Arnebeck, one of Ohio’s leading election protection attorneys.
“This legislation originates with a demand that one-party rule by made
permanent throughout the United States.”
With today’s passage of Ohio HB3, along with the seating of
Justice Alito, the GOP grip on the American throat has very
significantly tightened.
—
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE
AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008, available at
http://www.freepress.org/. They are co-editors, with Steve Rosenfeld,
of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO? forthcoming from the New Press.