Four Ways the Ohio GOP is Already Stealing the 2012 Election - by Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis
Published on Monday, August 27, 2012 by Common Dreams
Four Ways the Ohio GOP is Already Stealing the 2012 Election
by Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis
1. Since 2009, the Ohio GOP has purged roughly a million citizens from the state's voter rolls. This accounts for some 15% of the roughly 5.2 million votes counted for president in the state in 2008. The purge focusses on counties that are predominantly urban and Democratic.
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2012/1927
2. Electronic voting machines have been installed throughout the state which are owned, operated, programmed and maintained -- and will be tallied -- by Republican-connected firms.
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2012/1925
3. The GOP controls both houses of the Ohio Legislature, the governorship, the Secretary of State's office, and the state Supreme Court. Soon after the 2008 election, it imposed a draconian photo ID law designed to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of suspected Democrats, as is being done throughout the US. But Ohio is a referendum state. A statewide grassroots movement recently crushed a GOP-pushed anti-labor law, and many Republicans feared the photo ID law would also go down. Then GOP stalwart Jon Husted (now the Secretary of State) was ruled ineligible to hold office over a residency conflict. Ohio's Supreme Court re-instated his eligibility, but he was prompted to oppose the photo ID law. Today a prospective Ohio voter can use 17 different kinds of ID, but in recent elections some poll workers have demanded photo ID anyway. Without a grassroots army of independent election monitors to protect them, many more Ohioans are likely to be disenfranchised.
4. In 2004, 10.6% of the votes cast in Ohio were so-called "early votes" via absentee ballots. A voter had to be absent from the county to vote absentee. In-person Election Day voters at the 42 predominantly black inner-city precincts in Columbus waited between 3-7 hours to vote.
the rest:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/27-3
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