Ohio about to become a GOP dictatorship
A bleak picture from Free Press' Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman:
Remember, it's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes. Republicans are attempting to ensure that democracy is stamped out in Ohio. It's beyond outrageous. What they are trying to do goes against everything that America stands for and has ever stood for.
To them, the Constitution is a scrap of paper. The flag is an assortment of colors. Freedom, liberty, equality, opportunity - Republicans don't care about those values. They are hungry for power. And in Ohio, their sheer lust for pure, raw power is on display. They will try to hide it. But they must be exposed.
If they can destroy democracy in Ohio, they can destroy it here. We've got to do everything we can to stop them.
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 US Senate seat in 2006, are about to end.Just when you think they can't sink any lower, they do. Ohio is about to become a GOP dictatorship. It'll be like communist Russia. You can vote in the election, but it doesn't mean anything.
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.
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In traditional terms, the scandal-ridden Ohio GOP would appear to be more vulnerable than ever. Governor Robert Taft has become the only Ohio governor to be convicted of a crime while in office. With an astonishing 7% approval rating, he has been compared to Homer Simpson by the state's leading Republican newspaper. Republican US Senator Mike DeWine appears highly vulnerable. The GOP has never won the White House without winning the Buckeye State.
But HB3 will solidify the GOP's iron grip on the electronic voting process and all that surrounds it. Unless they break that grip, Democrats who believe they can carry any part of Ohio in 2006 or 2008 are kidding themselves.
Remember, it's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes. Republicans are attempting to ensure that democracy is stamped out in Ohio. It's beyond outrageous. What they are trying to do goes against everything that America stands for and has ever stood for.
To them, the Constitution is a scrap of paper. The flag is an assortment of colors. Freedom, liberty, equality, opportunity - Republicans don't care about those values. They are hungry for power. And in Ohio, their sheer lust for pure, raw power is on display. They will try to hide it. But they must be exposed.
If they can destroy democracy in Ohio, they can destroy it here. We've got to do everything we can to stop them.
