The Brad Blog has a great entry that must be given much wider exposure before Ohio votes to outlaw democracy sometime next week.
Republicans, suffering from dismal approval ratings and sensing there is no way they will retain control of Ohio's legislature in 2006 unless they prevent actual votes from being counted, have come up with an incredibly corrupt "election reform law."
A divinity student is continuing his prayer vigil and hunger strike at the Ohio Statehouse despite heavy snow and brutally cold winter temperatures. The blog entry is here. Another quote is below the fold.
"Most people don't realize that this legislation, if passed by the senate next week, would make it virtually impossible for homeless folks to vote, would make it virtually impossible for groups to register large numbers of voters, would eliminate oversight of voting machines, and would cancel our right to challenge election results."
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.
It has passed the House already along strictly partisan lines. If you live in Ohio, contact your
state senator to let them know of your anger. If you live outside of Ohio, contact nearby major and national news outlets to let them know what is going on!
12/11/05 UPDATE: You can read the entire bill here. I admit that I have not done so, primarily because of it's enormous length. If you have the time to read it, a very helpful post explaining how a bill should be read is here.
In this post, I have relied on the analysis of Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman in their article in The Free Press. While others in the Kos community have a different opinion of them, I have found their past work to be accurate and thoughtful. The enormous consequences of what they are fighting to expose, intentional vote manipulation, make many people hesitant to believe them.
But unless we take a serious look at electonic voting --and especially the Diebold GEMS vote tabulation software (which counts votes from all sources --electronic, punch cards, and optical scan cards)-- all of our other campaign work will go for naught. Mathematics is the key to understanding how and where votes are changed. Ask mathematicians.
