Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted has suspended the two Democratic members of the Montgomery County Board of Elections for their actions intended to extend early voting hours. Montgomery County includes Dayton, one of our larger cities. This has been heating up over the weekend, with protests scheduled this morning for both Dayton and the state capital in Columbus. It strikes me as a pretty complicated issue, and I’m not sure I could adequtely summarize it, but it just boggles my mind that he is going so far as to remove the 2 Democrats.
This happened after Husted started authorizing late and weekend voting in Republican-majority counties only right?
Boy, they’re not even trying to hide the fact they’re trying to game the polls, are they?
And that’s coming right after this coprolithic gem:
:rolleyes: In partisan-neutral civic-democratic terms, Mr. Preisse, a “voter-turnout machine” is an unequivocally good thing. Also “fair and reasonable”.
Yes, the battle for Ohio is being fought in the trenches. And it definitely involves mud.
He responded to protests by curtailing it in all counties, which looks fairer, but really ain’t much improvement.
I think he agreed to extend the weekday hours into the evening, but said no to any weekend hours. And I think the idea was to keep things the same across all counties. Previously, I think he had been denying both types of extended hours in cases where he cast the deciding vote. Those cases were where the two Democrats voted to extend the hours and the two Republicans voted against, which was in heavily Democratic counties. In heavily Republican counties both parties’ election board members voted to extend hours, and there was no need for Husted to cast a tie-breaking vote. So I don’t think that Husted is necessarily being inconsistent, although the Republicans together were.
Is there any state where they aren’t pulling this happy horseshit? Getting hard to keep up. Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the big swingers, they are pulling every trick in the book to try and keep the number of Dem voters down. I’m used to their usual bullshit, lies, innuendo, and money. But this, using their power in the state legislature to legally give themselves an electoral advantage? By hindering and discouraging legitimate voters?
Barry Goldwater would puke his guts out.
Update in a related issue:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120831/us-early-voting-dispute/
“A federal judge in Ohio on Friday granted a request from President Barack Obama’s campaign to give all voters in the swing state the option of casting their ballot in person during the three days before Election Day.”
This announcement was followed immediately by an announcement from the Republican Attorney General that he would appeal the decision.
Battleground Ohio continues.
Maybe someone can clarify this for me. If the voting times across the state need to be uniform as per Husted, then why were there even votes to extend hours county by county? Shouldn’t it be an all or none thing?
Now let’s assume Husted is wrong and under Ohio law each county can extend out hours. One county allows voting during non-work hours and another doesn’t. Isn’t there now an inequity in voting rights i.e. I have to take off work to vote but you don’t?
As I understand it, in previous years, each county’s Board of Elections was allowed to make its own decision about whether to extend evening and weekend hours for early voting. The composition of each board is 2 Republicans and 2 Democrats, with the Secretary of State Jon Husted being the one to cast tie-breaking votes. I can’t quickly find the previous stories, but as I recall, many boards were deadlocked and Husted was using his tie-breaking vote to reduce early voting opportunities in the large urban counties which tended to vote Democratic and to permit extended early voting in the more rural counties which tended to vote Republican. This produced an outcry about fairness and Husted’s response was to decree uniform hours for all counties.
I never saw the directive issued by Husted but one of the Democrats on the Montgomery County Board claimed that the directive did not specifically mention weekends. He thus felt that the county board could, if it chose, offer weekend hours. He made a motion, his fellow Democrat seconded the motion, and the vote was a 2-2 tie. But instead of just casting a tie-breaking vote, Husted ordered the Democrat who had offered the motion to rescind it. He refused and Husted then suspended both of the Democrats for failing to follow the directive. I should also add that he has since fired them, which gives the county party officials 15 days to submit names of replacements.
I understand the point about fairness but I also understand that it makes sense to let each county make its own decision based upon the widely varying needs. Cuyahoga County is the home of Cleveland, a major urban area. They probably benefit from extended hours to a greater extent than, say, Auglaize County, where I grew up. I don’t believe there’s a town in the entire county with a population greater than 10,000. Several are classified as “villages,” meaning their population is less than 5,000. I seriously doubt they have long lines at their polling places and probably don’t have much need for extended hours. Employers are required to grant up to 2 hours of leave for voting and in these small towns, that’s probably more than enough. In the big cities, it’s probably a different story. So I could be swayed in either direction. But the Montgomery County officials felt that their previous experience demonstrated the value of weekend hours and wanted to be able to provide that service to their voters. In essence, it’s just a microcosm of the stalemate we’re seeing in Washington with Republicans and Democrats digging in their heels and refusing to budge.
A lot depends on your conception of voter equality, which is never actually spelled out anywhere. A lot of folks take the line that so long as you are not actually forbidden to vote, you are equal. People forget that during the Jim Crow era, there were few (none?) laws that actually forbade black folks from voting, there were other means to accomplish that end.
For these people, it is also axiomatic that if the suburban voter can nip into his polling place and be out in half an hour, he is exactly equal in voting rights to the inner city guy who waits four hours and then maybe doesn’t get to vote anyway. I heartily disagree, but its legal and constitutional…
Its not about forbidding people to vote, and it never really was. Its all about making it more difficult for the people you’d prefer didn’t vote.
I agree but I’m thinking that if you don’t extend out the hours in certain counties, then it makes it nearly impossible for people that can’t take the time off to vote to get to the the polls. Since these are probably Republican (notice how working 8 solid hours = Republican while poor minority = Democrat) then I’m outraged because OMG THE DEMOCRATS ARE DISENFRANCHISING REPUBLICANS!
OK not really but it seems to me that if hours need to be extended, then there is a problem with the system. If it takes 4 hours to vote in the inner city, set up more polling places. How does absentee voting work in Ohio and why is that not an alternative to extended hours.
Now about Husted. I’d have to check the rules for parliamentary procedure in Ohio government bodies but it is a basic rule in parliamentary law that once a motion is made, seconded and presented, it belongs to the body and not the person making it. That means that a person cannot recind their own motion and it must be disposed of through a subsidiary motion or voting (and once you start to vote it cannot be cancelled). Husted might have been asking the Dem to do something that while not illegal would certainly violate the Rules of Order.
I can certainly understand after the 2000 Florida debacle and every county setting their own standards (which I believe was declared unconstitutional by SCOTUS 7-2 in Bush v. Gore) why states would err on the side of uniformity. I would even accept if Husted went by the letter of the law and said, “These are the legal voting hours. If you want to vote, you’ll figure it out.” but it sound like he’s just making it up as he goes along to fit his agenda.
I don’t know what the law is now, but it used to be that absentee voting was available only to people who were either homebound or who would be absent from the county on election day.
Ohio has allowed anyone to get an absentee ballot since at least 2006. IIRC, it was instituted after the disastrous problems that some counties experienced in 2004.
According to Democrats and Republicans by Joseph Fried, one poll shows Republicans working an average of 3 hours more than Democrats and another 2 hours. Democratic women work 1.5 more hours than their Republican counterparts though.