Republican Secretary of State has turned the office into a partisan lapdog, not a watchdog for voters’ rights
In response to Secretary of State Jon Husted failure to speak out publicly today against SB 205 or SB 238 as passed by the Ohio House of Representatives, ODP Deputy Communications Director Brian Hester released the following statement:
“After the 2004 elections, there was a bipartisan agreement that Ohio’s election laws needed reform. Since then, Republicans have worked nonstop to roll back those reforms to prevent people who don’t support Republicans from voting. As Secretary of State, Jon Husted took an oath to protect Ohio voter’s right to vote, but has clearly failed to lead. Instead, Husted yet again chose to be a lapdog for his own party.”
BACKGROUND
Three major Ohio editorials have recently made it clear that these bills were being passed for no other reason than deny likely Democratic voters the vote before the 2014 election. The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s editorial today said that the measures “aim to limit voting by Ohioans who might vote for Democrats” and called passage of the bills “an affront to democracy” that allowed politicians to “pick their own voters.” [Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer (2/19/2014), “Ohio House Republicans should walk away from bills aimed at decreasing the ease of voting in Ohio”]
The Toledo Blade editorial said the bills “would make it harder to vote among citizens whom GOP politicians would rather keep away from the polls.” On the GOP argument that the bills were need to fight “voter fraud,” the Blade noted “[t]hat argument would be more credible if those who make it could point to specific examples of fraud in Ohio voting that their measures would prevent. But they can’t offer evidence of systematic fraud, because it doesn’t exist. These bad measures aren’t as blatant as the poll taxes and literacy tests that Southern elections officials used during the civil rights era a half-century ago to keep African-Americans from voting. But their effect is largely, and intolerably, the same, and their approval would seem to invite court challenges under federal voting rights law.” [Source: Toledo Blade (2/19/14), “Don’t suppress the vote”]
The Akron Beacon Journal editorial noted that the Republicans decided that “[r]ather than work in a bipartisan way on a comprehensive overhaul of election laws, the Republican-run legislature has proceeded on its own unfortunate course. This week, the Ohio House is working on bills that push aside important priorities and contain flaws that would make voting more difficult.” [Source: Akron Beacon Journal (2/18/2014), “Election partisans”]
Jon Husted supports cutting early voting days by a week. According to the Columbus Dispatch, Secretary of State Husted recommends that “early voting would instead start 29 days before the election” but it end during the afternoon “the Sunday before the general election.” Currently, Ohio law permits early voting for thirty-five days before the general election. [Source: Columbus Dispatch, (10/24/2013), “Husted promotes limits on early voting.”
Federal courts already ruled that Husted’s attempts to cut general election early voting days are illegal. In 2012, the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Ohio ruled that Ohio could not cut off early voting the Friday before the general election. Republicans attempted to reduce the number of days of early voting, but the Ohio General Assembly reversed them after HB 194 was threatened with a referendum campaign. [Source: Reuters (8/31/12), “Court overturns Ohio early voting restrictions in win for Democrats.”]
The decision to declare Republicans’ attempt to cut off early voting before Election Day was upheld by federal appellate courts. The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision declaring the restriction “unconstitutional.” “The court acknowledged an argument that ‘low-income and minority voters are disproportionately affected by elimination’ of the three days of polling for many voters and said ‘there is no definitive evidence… that elections boards would be tremendously burdened’ by returning poll access to the standard before recent changes to the state’s laws.”
[Source: CNN (10/5/2012), “Federal court upholds Ohio early voting ruling.”]
According to official records maintained by Jon Husted’s own office, more than 600,000 Ohioans used Early Voting in 2012. [Source: Ohio Secretary of State’s website, 2012 “Absentee Ballot Report.”]