With new legislation, Ohio Republicans plan holiday burial for American De

[Piedras]

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1607

With new legislation, Ohio Republicans plan holiday burial for American Democracy
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
December 6, 2005

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.

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.

The GOP is ramming similar bills through state legislatures around the US, starting with Georgia and Indiana. The ID requirements in particular have provoked widespread opposition from newspapers such as the New York Times. The Times, among others, argues that the ID requirements and the costs associated with them, constitute an unconstitutional discriminatory poll tax.

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edit: first found it at http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0512/S00078.htm

[don954]

1. shades of the enableing act, anyone?

[sinkingfeeling]

2. I read it this morning and am devastated. I am totally without hope

that the USA can be saved. Our democracy is fading fast.

[HomerRamone]

3. Kick and nominated. This should be posted in GD n/t

[VaYallaDawg]

4. Very, very scary - a major swing state in every Pres. election!!!!

[deacon2]

5. This bill is an admission of guilt and they still got away with it!

Why would they need to impose new Jim Crow laws, exempt voting machines from scrutiny and ban challenges to federal elections if those were not precisely the means by which they stole the last election(s)? And doesn't seem to be a damn thing we can do about it. Same story with the Supreme Court. And the circuit courts one by one. GOP redistricting in Texas and on the march in other states now too. By the time we can do anything - and that's a big IF - it may not matter anymore.

I fear now that John Kerry might just have been our last hope. But he fucked up with extreme prejudice by not carrying through on an immediate challenge in Ohio - and left us saddled with Bush and the horror that is Hillary Sell-out Clinton in 2008, or whatever heartless psychopath is her challenger from the Christocratic Party.

I believed in him, I worked for him and I voted for him. I promised everyone that would listen that he wasn't going to give up this time - and so did he. Then he sold us out in 24 short hours. What happened to the John Kerry that promised to fight? What happened to the John Kerry that did fight in the 70s?

WTF happened?

[Vidar]

6. We are royally screwed.