Husted takes credit for cleaning up a non-problem

Do you recall how Secretary of State Jon Husted and a number of other Republicans on the voter-suppression goon squad were trying to narrow the goal posts for Ohio's  minorities in the last presidential election?  Voter fraud might  alter the outcome of the election, they warned.

Well, I'm pleased to report that of the 5.6 million votes that were cast, only 625 were considered questionable, according to a post-election survey by Husted's office and county boards of election.  Of those only 115  were sent to local prosecutors for possible action.

Now upbeat from the findings, Husted said his efforts to clean up the election paid off.  Cool.

Husted's pre-election hustle, he now says, was merely an attempt to get at the facts.
He said the concerns of voters were driven by "hyperbole" and it was through his office's efforts that  fraud was hardly existent,  or as he put it in a puffy release: "This report demonstrates that voter fraud does exist, but it is not epidemic. (Of those cases where duplicate ballots were cast, "only one of those ballots was ultimately counted,"  he boasted.

Immodestly, he took credit for the clean-up, insisting  that the "safeguards we have in place worked in the majority of these cases."

We have a winner for our latest Grumpy Abe Linguistic Lunacy (GALL) award.  See above.

Husted, Blackwell: Doubling down on 'voter fraud'

Secretary of State Jon Husted will find an audience that will believe him when he appears  at the True the Vote and Ohio Voter Protection summit conference on Saturday in Worthington, Oh.  The mission will be to "discuss election integrity  within the  state," the sponsors say.  And to reassure eveyone that the event will stay on message Husted will join former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell as one of the conferees.

Well, now.   We all know that nobody screwed up the election process more than Blackwell in 2004, from lack of voting machines to challenging the weight of the paper ballots.  I doubt that Husted will want to write home about his noble role at the meeting, particularly now that he is being challenged to show that his new restricted hours policy for early voters is bearing heavily on black voters.  .

Among other speakers will be Anita MonCrief, identified as"ACORN Whistleblower and publisher of something called ''Emerging Corruption'" and a few other self-important defenders of the ballot - as they know it - even though they will have an enduring reputation as elephants in the chicken coop.

Catherine Engelbrecht, the founder and president of True the Vote,  reassuringly tells us that that one must "make sure that every vote is counted," She says she's excited that  the panel of speakers  "will provide us with thoughts about the challenges related  to voter fraud in Ohio". Isn't that  how Dubya used to warn us about all those non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

 By the way, reporters  can't crash this love-in unless they  have, it says here, media credentials and  "photo ID".   It's a start.

PS:  My column on the anemia of the Republican Party  with candidates like Josh Mandel and Todd Akin has been posted with a (few words about the Summit County GOP) on Plunderbund.Com.

Courage against the GOP fraud of charging voter fraud

I am calling today for a one of those sweeping waves at sports stadiums to honor a true American.

He is a fellow named Christopher Broach, a Democrat who is an elections inspector in Colwyn, Pa., which is quite near Philadelphia.  Broach told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he has no intention of enforcing Pennsylvania's voter-suppressing  photo ID  law, explaining:  "To ask me  to enforce something that violates civil rights is ludicrous and absolutely something I am not willing to do.''

Although Broach risks a fine or jail, he's not backing off. The law has the potential of denying tens upon tens of thousands of otherwise eligible voters from casting ballots, particularly in the City of Brotherly Something,  where 43 pct. of the voters do not have a state-issued ID. This GOP inspired  witch's brew is now being challenged in court by the ACLU and the NAACP  and is being investigated by the U.S.Department of Justice.

All of this in the name of fighting voter "fraud".  But , wait.  As the case went to trial, the state has now said it cannot produce in court  any  evidence of fraud.  No evidence!!!.. We thought so.

And Pennsylvania's Republican Gov. Tom Corbett , who signed the law, concedes that  he can't remember what kind of ID's are acceptable.  Well,  a governor can't think of everything.

The  only honest view from a Republican in this matter is state House Majority  Leader Mike Tarzai, who inocently says the law "allows Romney to win Pennsylvania."  But the fraud, sir. The fraud...Oh?

Meanwhile, time to whip up the spirited wave for Christopher Broach.  I'm glad somebody is getting it right.  Wanna bet no Republican is dumb enough to charge him with breaking the law?  On the other hand, we're not really dealing with functioning brains on the other side.

LaRose; the Kasich era is doing just fine

I USUALLY DON'T spend much time reading newsletters from politicians. By nature, they are far more self-serving than newsy. But in a day when the hometown dailies are giving so little coverage to the area's lawmakers, I may have to change my habit of ignoring the home-grown dispatches from Columbus.

For a blatant example, the latest copy of Ohio Senate News from Akron-area freshman Sen. Frank LaRose is full of feel-good stuff about how well Republicans from Gov. Kasich on down are serving the vital interests of Ohioans by eliminating wealth-tilted estate taxes by Jan 1, 2013 (current tax is on estates of more than $338,333). Another GOP perk for the big dogs.

Public education? Says Rose: "No public school district will receive less state aid than they are currently receiving (excluding federal stimulus spending)..."

Ahem, there , Senator. According to the Ohio Education Association and other sources, the budget provides $2.9 billion less in the next biennium.

But for the purpose of this piece, I want to mention LaRose's defense of so-called GOP election reforms. Such notorious tactics are often used as a defense against mythical voter fraud. Republicans are good at defending their reforms in a way to disguise their intention to block millions of eligible voters from voting. That would include minorities, young people and seniors. (They still haven't found a way to disfranchise garden-variety Democrats, who may be none of the above.)

I shouldn't be picking on LaRose, I guess. He's new at his party's sleight-of word. It wasn't that long ago that local county chairmen were referring quaintly to African-Americans as "the Colored" and they cannot change at this late day, even if their guy Herman Cain accuses his brothers and sisters of being "brainwashed."

We've been down this road so many times and each time voter fraud has been exposed as a souped-up myth. The classic example was in 2009 in Cincinnati when the Hamilton County Prosecutor, Joe Deters, a Republican, subpoenaed the records of about 600 voters on suspicion that they were playing games at the polls. It was enough to serve as the searing legislative catalyst for new and tighter voter restrictions. In the end they turned up one case: a man described as a"half-breed Muslim " had been in Cincinnati from Connecticut to visit his sister and cast a vote. One - from several hundred thousand votes that had been cast. OK, you can never be too careful these days, right?

In the name of electoral honesty, the GOP is advancing it's nefarious campaign across the country with the potential of restricting millions of legitimate voters with the notion of voter fraud like the ohh-soo horrible one in Cincinnati. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, more than 5 million eligible voters will find it much harder to vote because of walls erected by GOP politicians. (Ohio did retreat from a government photo ID requirement, but other issues still stand in the way of the voters.)

If Frank LaRose is proud of this, so be it. The rest of us shouldn't be. I'm not.

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Come rain or snow in Ohio - or photo IDs.

ONCE UPON A TIME, it was common for Republican politicians to root for bad weather on election day because as one GOP official then confided to me, more of "the coloreds" would stay home. Times have changed, if not the bottom line. Today, thanks to the nasties in the Ohio legislature, the weather is not as crucial to trimming the voter turnout. The perps down there in Columbus - the epicenter of a lot of terrible ideas these days - have turned to less iffy ways to assure their success: under the phony rubric of voter fraud, they want all voters to arrive with photo IDs to prove that they are who they say they are, current felony laws notwithstanding.

As Sen. Keith Faber, the Celina Republican,'' put it in the Columbus Dispatch, the legislative measure is absolutely necessary because it is "relevant, topical and timely"'. And if that isn't persuasive enough to alert us to the evil of massive voter fraud, word was being passed around in the Statehouse that a guy was found to have voted twice in Cincinnati.

We are living in an age of the worst political sorcery in which a party of fake do-gooders has abandoned integrity for a reign of terror on the underclass. So would it be equally ruthless to mention that the Republicans have had their share of election fraud?

For example, Charles P.White, no less than Indiana's Republican secretary of state, has been indicted on seven felony charges involving voting.

And wasn't James Tobin, then President George W. Bush's New England campaign manager, convicted of taking part in a plot to jam Democrats' phones?

Against those exemplary events, maybe I should be a bit troubled to learn that the Cincinnati hoodwinker actually was an out-of-stater who cast a ballot in that city. And there's more: an inmate voted twice from jail. It was hardly reassuring to be told by Hamilton County elections officials that these were the only two mischievous cases out of 400,000 votes cast in the county.

By now, you can see where I am going with this report: There is no evidence of massive voter fraud in the state. The only fraud is the sustained effort to deny voting rights in order to help a political party that is too intellectually corrupt to honestly represent everyone who shows up at the polls. And too dishonest to admit the basis for their shabby schemes.