Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted is going to keep trying to suppress the vote until the very last minute. This guy has no shame and no sense of fair play. He just wants Romney to win and will do anything to fix the vote in Ohio. Outrageous and scary that one man can have this much power over millions of voters in a state that often swings the election.
We could have legal problems on Wednesday thanks to this one unethical bureaucrat. Shades of Katherine Harris in Florida when she refused to certify the vote during the 2000 election that gave George W. Bush the Presidency instead of Al Gore.
From The Nation
Once again Husted is playing the voter suppression card, this time at the eleventh hour, in a controversial new directive concerning provisional ballots. In an order to election officials on Friday night, Husted shifted the burden of correctly filling out a provisional ballot from the poll worker to the voter, specifically pertaining to the recording of a voter’s form of ID, which was previously the poll worker’s responsibility. Any provisional ballot with incorrect information will not be counted, Husted maintains. This seemingly innocuous change has the potential to impact the counting of thousands of votes in Ohio and could swing the election in this closely contested battleground.
“Our secretary of state has created a situation, here in Ohio, where he will invalidate thousands and thousands of people’s votes,” Brian Rothenberg, executive director of ProgessOhio, said during a press conference at the board of elections in Cuyahoga County yesterday in downtown Cleveland. Added State Senator Nina Turner: “‘SoS’ used to stand for ‘secretary of state.’ But under the leadership of Jon Husted, ‘SoS’ stands for ‘secretary of suppression.’ ”
In 2008, 40,000 of the 207,000 provisional ballots cast in Ohio were rejected. The majority of the state’s provisional ballots were cast in Ohio’s five largest counties, which are strongly Democratic. Moreover, provisional ballots are more likely to be cast by poorer and more transient residents of the state, who are also less likely to vote Republican.
The number of discarded provisional ballots could rise significantly due to Husted’s directive. It’s also very likely that more provisional ballots will be cast in 2012 than in 2008, thanks to a wave of new voting restrictions in Ohio and nationwide. The Associated Press reported that 31 percent of the 2.1 million provisional ballots cast nationwide in 2008 were not counted, and called provisional ballots the “hanging chads of 2012."
Absolutely insane line to vote in Columbus, Ohio (via @finneganlatimes) twitter.com/thinkprogress/…
— ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) November 4, 2012
Pundits on Sunday Talk shows attacked Romney ads being shown in Ohio that imply that car companies that took bail-out money are now shipping jobs overseas. It was a bad day to be a Romney surrogate:
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