Bessent: Republicans back down on blatant effort to suppress votes in Ohio
A woman votes at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland as early voting began in Ohio's March 6 presidential primary. (Jan. 31, 2012) Credit: AP
Republicans’ insistence that their efforts to erect road blocks to voting are all about preventing fraud can’t explain away the skulduggery they tried in Ohio.
Until they were shamed into backing off Wednesday, they’d created a situation where people who live in counties that Republicans carried in 2008 could cast early ballots on evenings and weekends starting in October while people living in counties that favored Democrats that year could not. It was a cynical, transparent attempt to stack the deck for Republicans in the hotly contested swing state that could decide the presidential election.
County election boards in Ohio are equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. When the question of extended hours came up, Democrats on boards across the state supported them, but Republicans in counties likely to support Obama voted against them.
Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted was called on to break the ties, which he did in scurrilously partisan fashion. He blocked the extended hours in those counties, which incidentally have large minority populations. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, those locations gave Obama a nearly 500,000 vote advantage in 2008. Those where the expanded hours had been approved gave Republican John McCain a 90,000 vote edge.
The corrupt attempt to suppress the vote was so blatant, and the blowback so fierce, Republicans had to give it up. Husted announced yesterday that all of Ohio’s 88 counties will have the same early voting hours.
Attempts to suppress Democratic and minority votes in other states — for instance with voter ID requirements where there has been no evidence of fraud — aren't as obvious, but they’re just as pernicious.
Given the nation’s long history of denying the vote to black citizens, and the long, bloody fight to end that outrage, it’s unconscionable for the modern Republican party to go down that road again. It’s desperate and it’s un-American.
Pictured above: A woman votes at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland as early voting began in Ohio's March 6 presidential primary. (Jan. 31, 2012)
