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Citizens' Alliance for Secure Elections Press Release: Ohio Senate Rules Committee DEPRIVES VOTERS OF RIGHTS AND IGNORES THE REAL THREAT OF ELECTION FRAUD -- ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES.
H.B. 3 Ignores all Citizen Input in Passing H.B. 3:
CASE Ohio, Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, www.caseohio.org, warns of Increased Voter Disenfranchisement, the Dangers of Electronic Voting Machines, and the Unconstitutionality of Denying the Right to Register Voters and Challenge Election Results. COLUMBUS, OH - THE OHIO SENATE RULES COMMITTEE DEPRIVED OHIO VOTERS OF RIGHTS AND IGNORED THE REAL THREAT OF ELECTION FRAUD -- ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES. On December 7, 2005, (ISN"T THAT THE ANNIVERSARY OF PEARL HARBOR? IF SO WE SHOULD REFERENCE THAT AMERICANS WERE ATTACKED AGAIN) the Rules Committee of the Ohio Senate approved H.B. 3 despite months of strong opposition from voting rights groups such as CASE, the League of Women Voters, (name other groups) and myriad individuals. The four Democrat committee members refused to take part in the final vote and walked out to protest the Republican steamrolling of their legislative colleagues and the public.
HB 3 requires, among other things, that voters present a current, government-issued ID with a current address. This requirement alone will affect hundreds of thousands of voters and will disenfranchise many tens of thousands of them. Students, the elderly, youth, the homeless, and recently moved families will be required to produce alternate forms of ID. The result will be confusion, frustration, discouragement, and possibly anger directed toward the Ohio Senators who forced this bill into law.
HB 3 also makes it impossibly difficult for voting advocacy organizations to register new voters by making the process extremely slow and expensive and punishing workers who make a mistake with the threat of a felony penalty. Workers who could be working state-wide to register voters are now required to register with every Board of Elections in the state, take a test from every board, and return any registration to the board of the newly registered voter, as opposed to mailing the registrations in. This makes registration drives at gatherings like the Ohio State Fair and similar events impossible.
HB 3 also, in a deadly move, removes a process to audit the electronic voting machines, the touchscreen "black box" machines, which are proven to be prone to errors and susceptible to hacking, as recognized by the recent General Accounting Office (GAO) report, GAO 05-956 "Federal Efforts to Improve Security and Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Under Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed."
HB 3 has destroyed voters' rights to challenge election results. The Republicans in the Ohio legislature, while focusing their efforts on prohibiting access to voter registration and voting, failed to address the real threat of election fraud - Electronic Voting Machines. The General Accounting Office, (GAO) recently released a scathing107 page report on electronic voting machines in our country. The report supports what CASE has been claiming for the past two years - that electronic voting machines are not secure, not accountable, not transparent, not accurate, and not certifiable. A bipartisan panel, which included both Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Democratic Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) released a joint news release regarding the GAO report. Most community news sources have not yet made these important findings widely available to the public. CASE advises all Ohio voters to call, email, or FAX your State Senator today to tell them not to support HB 3.
CASE advises all Ohio voters to attend the Senate session at the Ohio Statehouse Tuesday, December 13, to sit in the gallery while the full Senate considers the passage of HB 3, at 1:30 PM.
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