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Ohio Election Activists Say Voters Fed Up

Updated 10:28 PM ET August 9, 2005
http://dailynews.att.net/cgi-bin/news?e=pr...8bsmcj80&src=ap

By JOHN McCARTHY

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Backers of three ballot issues to dramatically change Ohio elections said Tuesday that they are confident that voters are so sick of politics-as-usual that they will support the changes on Nov. 8.

Reform Ohio Now, a coalition of labor unions and Democrat-leaning activists, on Tuesday filed petitions with 521,000 signatures for each of three issues with Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio's chief elections official.

The group cleared its first hurdle on Tuesday when the Ohio Supreme Court unanimously dismissed a lawsuit seeking to keep the issues off the ballot.

One of the ballot issues would change the way congressional and legislative districts are drawn, another would create a state elections board and the third would lower the individual limit on campaign contributions.

Backers say Ohioans need to take more control of their elections because of the current investment scandal involving majority Republicans at the Statehouse and an elections system they see as flawed.

On the Net:

Reform Ohio Now: http://reformohionow.org

C-span just read an article about this activity in the New York Times.

The republicans dismiss the reform group as "disgruntled democrats". [They will try every legal and illegal means to stop these reforms.]

  Daily Kos: AP: GOP Busted on "No Voter Suppression" Pledge

"It originally appeared to us that there were just certain rogue elements of the Republican Party who were willing to do anything to win control of the U.S. Senate.. But now that the RNC actually is bankrolling Mr. Tobin's defense, coupled with the fact that it has refused some discovery in the civil case, [this] really raises the questions of who are they protecting, how high does this go and who was in on this,"

GOP Busted on "No Voter Suppression" Pledge
by wobblie
Thu Aug 11th, 2005 at 04:39:17 CDT

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/8/11/53917/1331

Thought I'd post a "head's-up" to someone more up on the history of this particular GOP criminal act than I. Found this AP story over at the Guardian.

First, Ken Mehlman's "solemn word":
Earlier this week, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director, reiterated a "zero-tolerance policy" for any GOP official caught trying to block legitimate votes.

"The position of the Republican National Committee is simple: We will not tolerate fraud; we will not tolerate intimidation; we will not tolerate suppression. No employee, associate or any person representing the Republican Party who engages in these kinds of acts will remain in that position," Mehlman wrote Monday to a group that studied voter suppression tactics.

That carefully worded bold section does not bind their hands, however, in paying the legal bills for someone who did engage in one of these activities.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Despite a zero-tolerance policy on tampering with voters, the Republican Party has quietly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide private defense lawyers for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to keep Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.

James Tobin, the president's 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.

A telephone firm was paid to make repeated hang-up phone calls to overwhelm the phone banks in New Hampshire and prevent them from getting Democratic voters to the polls on Election Day 2002, prosecutors allege. Republican John Sununu won a close race that day to be New Hampshire's newest senator.

There's a pattern emerging here. More and more, we see what look like just plain, old dirty tricks.

There's an old word in the political lexicon for this sort of behavior: Nixonian. And the GOP machine is run by Nixon alum. Karl Rove is a protégé of Donald Segretti, a dirty trickster paid by Nixon's re-election campaign.

And as with that classic tale of corruption from yore, there's a simple rule to which one should adhere:

Follow. The. Money.

Again, from the AP story:
Paul Twomey, a volunteer lawyer for New Hampshire Democrats who are pursuing a separate lawsuit involving the phone scheme, said he was surprised the RNC was willing to pay Tobin's legal bills and that it suggested more people may be involved.

"It originally appeared to us that there were just certain rogue elements of the Republican Party who were willing to do anything to win control of the U.S. Senate, including depriving Americans of their ability to vote," Twomey said.

"But now that the RNC actually is bankrolling Mr. Tobin's defense, coupled with the fact that it has refused some discovery in the civil case, really raises the questions of who are they protecting, how high does this go and who was in on this," Twomey said.

People already have a bitter taste in their mouth about the performance of the GOP since last November's election. Time to show that the rotten fruit is merely a symptom of a corrupt and decayed root.

The GOP is the Party of Corruption.

Pass it on.

The right wingers will never believe that votes in Ohio were suppressed or voters in Ohio were intimidated. Even if some republicans go to jail. Problems also occurred in other states, like PA, but the press never followed up on it after the election.

... read all about it on GOP.com. Boy, those guys just can't get over that a Dem won in Washington State. And you absolutely HAVE to read the political hatchet job this 'non-partisan' American Center for Voter's Rights did on the Ohio Voter Fraud issue. Folks, to read their assessment, you'd have thunk we WON in Ohio.

This would be the funniest joke of the new century if it wasn't so friggin' pathetic.
_______________________________________________________________
August 11, 2005

Dear Winston,

I wrote to you in May about the lengths to which Democrats went in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2004 elections, specifically, the Washington State Governor's race. Our Republican candidate, Dino Rossi, actually won the election, and then the recount, before then Democrat-controlled King County "found" 566 new votes just in time for a second recount, enough to overturn the results of Election Day and the first recount. The judge who presided over the court case that followed, actually said "this election may not be set aside simply because the number of fraudulent votes exceeds the margin of victory" when he issued his ruling against the Republican challenge.

Now, The American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund (ACVR Legislative Fund), a non-partisan, non-profit organization has released a new report documenting how thousands of Americans were disenfranchised during the 2004 elections because paid Democrat operatives were heavily involved in voter intimidation and suppression.

A few of examples include:

Coordinated efforts by certain "non-partisan" organizations to disrupt the election process in at least 12 states through voter registration fraud


Democrat operatives convicted for tire-slashing on GOP election day vans in Milwaukee


An Ohio court order stopping Democrat operatives from calling Republican voters telling them the wrong date for the election, and location for polling places
The report also indicated that the following were the top 5 "hot spots" in the nation for voter fraud:

1. Philadelphia, PA
2. Milwaukee, WI
3. Seattle, WA
4. St. Louis, MO/East St. Louis, IL
5. Cleveland, OH

We encourage you to view the ACVR report in it's entirety at www.ac4vr.com and forward this to your friends and family.

Fight back today by calling talk radio and writing letters to the editor describing the Democrats' efforts to undermine American's voting system.

Sincerely,

Michael DuHaime
RNC Political Director