With New Legislation, Ohio Republicans Plan Holiday Burial for American Democrac

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Wed, 07 Dec 2005 12:42:03 -0600

With New Legislation, Ohio Republicans Plan Holiday Burial

for American Democracy

 

 

 

 

With New Legislation, Ohio Republicans Plan Holiday Burial for

American Democracy

By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

The Free Press

 

Tuesday 06 December 2005

 

A law that will make democracy all but moot in Ohio is about to

pass the state legislature and to be signed by its Republican

governor. Despite massive corruption scandals besieging the Ohio GOP,

any hope that the Democratic party could win this most crucial swing

state in future presidential elections, or carry its pivotal US Senate

seat in 2006, are about to end.

 

House Bill 3 has already passed the Ohio House of Representatives

and is about to be approved by the Republican-dominated Senate,

probably before the holiday recess. Republicans dominate the Ohio

legislature thanks to a heavily gerrymandered crazy quilt of rigged

districts, and to a moribund Ohio Democratic party. The GOP-drafted

HB3 is designed to all but obliterate any possible future Democratic

revival. Opposition from the Ohio Democratic Party, where it exists at

all, is diffuse and ineffectual.

 

HB3's most publicized provision will require positive

identification before casting a vote. But it also opens voter

registration activists to partisan prosecution, exempts electronic

voting machines from public scrutiny, quintuples the cost of

citizen-requested statewide recounts and makes it illegal to challenge

a presidential vote count or, indeed, any federal election result in

Ohio. When added to the recently passed HB1, which allows campaign

financing to be dominated by the wealthy and by corporations, and

along with a Rovian wish list of GOP attacks on the ballot box,

democracy in Ohio could be all but over.

 

The GOP is ramming similar bills through state legislatures around

the US, starting with Georgia and Indiana. The ID requirements in

particular have provoked widespread opposition from newspapers such as

the New York Times. The Times, among others, argues that the ID

requirements and the costs associated with them, constitute an

unconstitutional discriminatory poll tax.

 

Full story:

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120605D.shtml

 

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