Ohio Republicans have become a party of whiners. You can almost hear them saying all across Ohio, "It isn't fair." Whine. Whine. Whine.
Here is a story from the right wing radio station in Columbus, WTVN:
Between September 30th and October 6th, Ohio elections officials will allow residents to register to vote and then immediately cast their ballot. That gives the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain a chance to bank thousands of first-time voters.....
....Deputy Chairman of the Ohio Republican Party Kevin DeWine objects to the move, claiming it will disenfranchise voters in the state. "If you go to the booth on election day you have to show some form of identification," said DeWine. "When you vote using an absentee ballot during that five-day window, no identification is required. We're just looking to make sure that the voters are who they say they are."
DeWine says his party will ask Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to intervene to stop the proposed voting measure. Brian Clark from her office argues these laws were signed into law by former Ohio governor Bob Taft in 2006 and have been in place for the past two years.
The Ohio Republicans are faced with the prospect of voters exercising their rights. The Ohio GOP has been disenfranchising people for years. Years!!!! Here are some excerpts from an article on Ohio voting irregularities in OpEdNews:
...One of them has just surfaced to the staggering tune of 175,000 purged voters in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the traditional stronghold of the Ohio Democratic Party. An additional 10,000 that registered to vote there for the 2004 election were lost due to "clerical error."
As we reported more than a year ago, some 133,000 voters were purged from the registration rolls in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and Lucas County (Toledo) between 2000 and 2004. The 105,000 from Cincinnati and 28,000 from Toledo exceeded Bush's official alleged margin of victory -- just under 119,000 votes out of some 5.6 million the Republican Secretary of State. J. Kenneth Blackwell deemed worth counting.....
...But all tie votes are decided by the secretary of state, in this case Blackwell, the extreme right-wing Republican now running for governor. Blackwell served in 2004 not only as the man in charge of the state's vote count, but also as co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney campaign. Many independent observers have deemed this to be a conflict of interest. On election day, Blackwell met personally with Bush, Karl Rove and Matt Damschroder, chair of the Franklin County (Columbus) Board of Elections, formerly the chair of the county's Republican Party.....
The people of Ohio want free and fair elections. The Republicans and Kevin DeWine should just deal with it and stop acting like spoiled children.