Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Down Memory Lane

There are many, many reasons why Ohioans should not vote for Republican Jon Husted for Ohio Secretary of State.  I'll give you a few reasons:

(1) Most Ohioans know that Husted does not actually physically live in the district he represents in the Ohio Senate.  As a matter of fact, he lives in Upper Arlington, Ohio, with his family, and rarely returns to his house in Kettering (his utility bills proved it). Questions surrounding his residency were settled by the all Republican Ohio Supreme Court which sided with Husted, a Republican, over Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat.  The Ohio Supreme Court declared that he was a resident of the Kettering house he owns "for voting purposes."

(2) The last thing Ohio needs is for the Republicans to control the voter registration, the elections, and the counting of votes.

If you are new to the state, you might not know about the voting irregularities that were culture of Republican corruption when the Ohio GOP held the office of Ohio Secretary of State.

Let me take you for a stroll down memory lane with my blog entry from Monday,
February 25, 2008:

Republicans Worry About Vote

Kevin Dewine, Ohio GOP's "big macher" is worried about voting in Ohio. Dewine and the rest of the Republicans are concerned that their ability to "control" counting the votes, election machines, the availability of paper ballots, and even who gets to vote, is being threatened. They have demonized Jennifer Brunner. In the past in Ohio, votes were "counted" in back rooms and behind locked doors.

Do you remember these Republican voting manipulations?

1. Bernadette Noe (wife of Republican "Coingate" scandalmeister, Tom Noe): (Raw Story---->)

In yet another surreal twist in Ohio's coin-gate scandal, the wife of Bush's chief Ohio fundraiser, Tom Noe who is currently embroiled in campaign finance and money laundering probes surprised poll workers and observers alike by disrupting the ballot count during the 2004 general election, RAW STORY has discovered.
Bernadette Noe, who served dual roles as chairman for the Lucas County Republican Party and the Lucas County Board of Elections, sent twelve partisans into a warehouse on Election Day, according a memo authored by Ohio's Director of Campaign Finance Richard Weghorst who was present at the time....

2. Ohio Election Fraud Blog: The Republican head of the Board of Elections in Franklin County, Ohio, manipulated the supply of voting machines on November 2, denying thousands of likely Democrats the right to cast their votes in a fair and timely manner.

As indicated in the sworn testimony below, offered here for the first time, the election was engineered to make voting as difficult as possible for inner city residents, and to drive away those who could not afford to stay away from work or families, or whose health made it imprudent or impossible to endure the long, cold, wet lines......

Of course there was a shortage of voting machines in those areas that were dominated by African-American Democrats.

3. How can we forget the mess the Republicans created in Gambier, Ohio at Kenyon College when hundreds of college students had to wait for hours to vote because of the purposeful lack of voting machines?


Kenyon College website recounts the voting problems:
.....At 12:36 a.m. on election night, CNN.com posted the news that, "Even at this hour, people in Knox County are still voting. At Kenyon College some people stood in line for up to seven hours."
Bloomberg.com also observed that, "Voting in Ohio was plagued by long delays at some polling places. Voters in Gambier, the home of Kenyon College, waited more than four hours to cast their ballots. At the 1,500-student college, some voters were waiting in line after midnight." They reported that according to English professor David Lynn, poll workers told voters they might have to wait as much as five hours in order to vote....

These are just a small sample of how the Ohio GOP's culture of corruption "managed" voting in this state. Obviously, we don't want a repeat of this.

The next time you hear Kevin Dewine complaining about Jennifer Brunner, just remember he is mad because he and his cronies can't continue their past "Block The Vote" activities.



If you need another reminder of Republican dirty tricks during previous elections, check out the Rolling Stone article that was originally published by Rolling Stone (June 1, 2006), but now found at CommonDreams.org: Was the 2004 Election Stolen?  The article notes that - - - Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

That article will certainly inspire a lack of confidence in the Republicans.



- Do you want to revisit those long lines at polls, broken voting machines, challenges to your right to vote, backroom counting of votes, etc.???????   I know I don't want to live through that nightmare of voting irregularities again!


To vote for free and fair elections, vote for Mary Ellen O'Shaughnessy, Democrat,  for Ohio Secretary of State.