Exclusive: Ohio GOP’s secret voting scheme deliberations
Source: Salon
When Ohio's secretary of state cut early voting, it sparked an outrage. Here's how political the process really was
SPENCER WOODMAN
In February, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted announced his decision to cut early voting on Sundays and weekday evenings. This met swift opposition from voting rights advocates, who say the move is apiece with a Republican-led nationwide attack on voting methods highly utilized by minorities, who tend to lean Democratic.
Salon has obtained email correspondences of officials working for Husted. Covering more than three months leading up to his controversial changes to early voting, the records show no interest among three top officials, including the Secretary of State, in how eliminating Sunday voting might affect the state’s African-American communities, which had long placed particular emphasis on after-church voting.
The records also show that, in exercising its power to send information about the recent voting changes to organizations throughout the state, Husted’s office appears to express a strong preference for providing information to Republican-aligned groups, and even specifically addresses the possibility of excluding non-Republican legislators.
Emails in which Secretary of State officials deliberate on which groups should receive an educational document containing information about the state’s new voting protocol go into impressive detail on Republican-aligned organizations — Second Amendment groups, Right to Life, Tea Party, Conservative Groups, hunters, YR (Young Republicans), the Republican-aligned National Federation of Independent Business, and the Ohio Voter Integrity Project (a voter-fraud focused group that has been accused of harassing voters) — and then simply lists “minority groups” with apparently just one specific example (the reference to Rev. Pierce). At one point, the Secretary of State’s communications director asks whether the office should exclude all non-Republican legislators in the dissemination of voter education material.
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Read more: http://www.salon.com/2014/05/05/exclusive_new_emails_reveal_ohio_gops_voting_scheme_deliberations/
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