How OHIO’s Crooked and Racist Republicans Are Planning To Steal The 2012 Elections

Ohio is always a swing state for a very good reason.  That reason being that the Republican Party in Ohio will do anything it possibly can to steal every election, (How else can you explain John Boehner being in office) and of course this the year of the 2012 Presidential election is no different.

The GOP-hio Strategy in 2012 reflects much of what was done by the Republicans in  2000 and 2004 to steal those presidential elections for George W. Bush.

1. Since 2009, the Ohio GOP has purged some 1.25 million citizensfrom the state’s voter rolls. This accounts for more than 20% of the  roughly 5.2 million votes counted for president in the state in 2008.  The purge focusses on counties that are predominantly urban and  Democratic.

2. Electronic voting machines have been installed throughout the state which are owned, operated, programmed and maintained — and will be  tallied — by Republican-connected firms, including Diebold (now  Premier), ES&S and Triad.

3. The GOP controls both houses of the Ohio Legislature, the  governorship, the secretary of state’s office, and the state supreme  court. Soon after the 2008 election, it imposed a draconian photo ID law designed to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of suspected  Democrats, as is being done throughout the US. But Ohio is a referendum  state. A statewide grassroots movement recently crushed a GOP-pushed  anti-labor law, and many Republicans feared the photo ID law would also  go down. Then Husted was ruled ineligible to hold office over a  residency conflict. Ohio’s Supreme Court re-instated his eligibility,  but he was prompted to oppose the photo ID law. Today a prospective Ohio voter can use 17 different kinds of ID, but in recent elections some  poll workers have demanded photo ID anyway. Without a grassroots army of independent election monitors to protect them, many more Ohioans are  likely to be disenfranchised.

4. In 2004, 10.6% of the votes cast in Ohio were so-called “early  votes” via absentee ballots. A voter had to be absent from the county to vote absentee. In-person Election Day voters at the 42 predominantly  black inner-city precincts in Columbus waited between 3-7 hours to vote.

The Ohio Association of Election Officials, is overwhelmingly dominated  by Republicans from Ohio’s rural counties and thus they have control despite the small number of residents from those counties and they do everything that they possibly can to disenfranchise voters especially in urban and democratic areas. And even  the larger cities GOP representatives do all that they can to help.  Doug Priesse, Chair of the Franklin County (Columbus) GOP, sparked a  firestorm when he explained that  “I guess I really actually feel we  shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read  African-American — voter turnout machine.”

Unless the Democratic Party fights back and makes some last-minute  headway in reforming Ohio’s electoral system (Where is Eric Holder and the Department of Justice?) and the crocked, racist and well-connected Ohio GOP gets away with all their plans it could make it harsh reality that  Barack Obama might not be able to carry Ohio this November even against an elitist dog of a candidate like Mitt Romney