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Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

We are aware of all internet traditions.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Consistently wrong since 2002

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

This really is a full service blog.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Infrastructure week. at last.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

I was promised a recession.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

You are here: Home / Archives for Past Elections / Election 2010

Election 2010

Well, here is a bit of good news…

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Schurick-found-guilty

My house was one of the houses that this weasel had called on Election Day. Voter suppression efforts like this are key to EVERY Republican election strategy, so it is nice to see a scam exposed and punished from time to time (you can read the local coverage in the Sun Papers here and more here).

The evidence included a memo that described “The Schurick Doctrine” in unusually blunt terms:

The first and most desired outcome is voter suppression. The goal is to have as many African American voters stay home as a result of triangulation messaging based on the Schurick Doctrine.

The second most desired outcome is to get African American voters to skip voting in the bracket for Governor and only vote “down the ballot.” This outcome’s achievement is primarily rooted in confusion about which candidate is suitable to receive their vote.
Example: Neither Ehrlich or O’Malley are worth two cents. I don’t like either one!

The third and less likely outcome is to get some, about thirty-five thousand, African American Democrats to switch over at the top of the ticket and vote for Bob Ehrlich statewide.

Somehow, the Jury didn’t buy the defense that these “don’t bother to vote” robocalls were really an effort to GOTV for Democrats.

I hope they throw the book at Schurick and sentence him to five* twelve years of hard time. Even if that happens, he can go to the big house knowing that thousands of Republican operatives will be following his doctrine to the letter as they feverishly work to Block the Vote in 2012. This is an ongoing Republican crime wave that cries out for more exposure and prosecutions.

Cheers

*fixed, as it turns out he could be sentence to 12 years.

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From the ground up

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I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. As usual, voters are way ahead of professional national opinion leaders. To borrow a phrase used in the article, the Tea Party is now “less an abstraction” to the people who actually live in Tea Party districts, as opposed to the national narrative creators who don’t live in these districts.

Support for the Tea Party — and with it, the Republican Party — has fallen sharply even in places considered Tea Party strongholds, according to an analysis of new polls.

In Congressional districts represented by Tea Party lawmakers, the number of people saying they disagree with the movement has risen significantly since it powered a Republican sweep in midterm elections; almost as many people disagree with it as agree with it, according to the analysis by the Pew Research Center.

The analysis suggests that the Tea Party may be dragging down the Republican Party heading into a presidential election year, even as it ushered in a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives just a year ago. Other polls have shown a decline in support for the Tea Party and its positions, particularly because its hard line during the debate over the debt ceiling and deficit reduction made it less an abstraction than it was a year ago. In earlier polls, most Americans did not know enough about the Tea Party to offer an opinion.

I’m just guessing here, but maybe people watching the insane debt limit fight from out here in the cheap seats thought it was stupid and counterproductive and reckless, rather than principled and worthwhile? Maybe they’re noticing that Tea Party House members never actually get any work done?

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I thought we were winning but we may be losing

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I started reading more about for-profit K-12 schools last spring because I was talking with people about teachers and unions during the Issue Two campaign.

In the course of those conversations, I found that people here were very surprised to learn that nearly half of “public” charter schools in Ohio are run by for-profit entities. They weren’t happy about it either, which isn’t surprising, because privatization isn’t what they were sold when they were sold public education reform. When a politician or expert tells people “we’re reforming your public schools!” people just naturally assume those politicians and experts actually mean “reforming public schools” not “creating publicly funded for-profit schools”. Those are two different things to an ordinary non-expert person.

I’ve been following the progress of one lawsuit against a for-profit in Ohio (here for the prior posts). The company in question has a lousy record on educating kids, but that isn’t really my focus. When tracking the burgeoning for-profit education sector I’m just following the money.

This company, White Hat, operates schools in five states. White Hat schools are called public schools but they should really be called for-profit schools, because for most people, “public” means “not for profit”. I don’t believe the use of the word “public” and the omission of the word “profit” in the education business is an accident. It’s marketing.

Publicly funded for-profit schools scare the hell out of me, because the stakes are very high. We could lose not-for-profit public education. We may still have publicly-funded education, but that’s not the same thing.

In this particular lawsuit, parents sued the for-profit manager of ten charter schools because they wanted some transparency and accountability on where the public money was going.

White Hat stonewalled on where the money went, then the case then took a dramatic turn outside of court, on the Ohio legislature side:

A Franklin County judge has given charter-school kingpin David L. Brennan and the schools suing his for-profit management company an additional 60 days to work on a new contract. But Gov. John Kasich and GOP leaders in the General Assembly might resolve the year-old lawsuit sooner. The Senate will decide next week whether to keep several charter-school provisions added to the budget by House Republicans at Brennan’s request. Many involve issues at the center of the lawsuit against his White Hat Management Co., including one that would allow the for-profit company to keep secret how it spends tax dollars it receives to operate charter schools. Another would give White Hat possession of school desks, supplies and other items purchased with tax dollars, should a school close.

Those measures were sidelined, but only because they got an enormous amount of negative attention. They would have turned over publicly-owned assets to for-profit education management companies, which was apparently too much reform and exciting innovation for even Ohio to rubberstamp. So, despite last-ditch efforts by Republicans to rescue White Hat, the lawsuit went forward. Then the public and the parents had an interim win, when the judge ordered the for-profit actor to turn over (some) records. So close, we were!

Well, sadly, we’ve now suffered a setback that may prove fatal:

A Franklin County judge who ordered a for-profit management company to turn over records showing how it spent millions in tax dollars to operate public charter schools is now questioning whether he should even be involved in the lawsuit. Common Pleas Judge John F. Bender has suspended “all further discovery” until he determines jurisdiction.
The development is a setback for the charter schools that filed suit nearly 18 months ago challenging the authority of White Hat Management Co. — the private firm of Akron businessman and major GOP donor David L. Brennan. Last month, Bender ruled that White Hat is a public official when acting as an authorized agent of a public charter school. The designation would make White Hat subject to Ohio public-record laws, requiring it to account for the public dollars it receives, information that for years the company has been unwilling to disclose.

For years.

If the parents can’t get relief in a court, and without jurisdiction they’re not getting anything, I guess they go to the legislature. The same legislature that introduced measures last spring that could have been written by for-profit education management companies, measures that were so outrageous a transfer of public assets to for-profit education entities that they didn’t survive the most cursory public evaluation. I wish them a lot of luck with that route. I think they’re going to need it.

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Good news for voting enthusiasts

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From cautious optimism:

Earlier this year, Ohio Gov. John Kasich® signed a sweeping bill intended to make it harder to vote in his states’ elections. Kasich’s anti-voter law drastically cuts back on early voting and erects new barriers for absentee and even for election day voters. Today, however, opponents of Kasich’s war on voting will submit over 300,000 signatures to the Secretary of State’s office — well over the 231,000 signatures necessary to suspend the law until it can be challenged in a referendum in November of 2012. If enough of the signatures are deemed valid, the practical effect of this petition will be that Kasich’s law will not be in effect during the 2012 presidential elections when Republicans hoped the law would weaken President Obama’s efforts to turn out early voters who support his reelection.

The number was 318,000, and that’s too close for comfort, because a lot of signatures will get thrown out as invalid. However, people who think legally registered voters should be permitted to vote no matter their net worth or wholly subjective degree of “real americanism” had two weeks to continue to gather signatures after submitting the initial petitions, and they did that.

Probably a done deal:

Last week, it was reported that the Ohio GOP had filed public-records requests of numerous boards of election across the state, apparently hoping to find irregularities to disqualify HB 194 (voter suppression) repeal petitions after 318,000 signatures were turned in to try to meet the requirement of just over 231,000 valid signatures Now that number probably would have done it, but it was a little close for comfort. And clearly, the Republicans were looking into anything they could to squeeze some signatures and petitions out of contention. But the repeal proponents had another two and a half weeks to gather signatures, and it appears they’ve hit this one well out of the iffy range — and probably out of range of any GOP challenge. Friday the Ohio Democratic Party announced that another 150,000 signatures were collected in that additional time period.
With almost 480,000 signatures — more than double the number needed — you’d need exceptionally sloppy petition circulators to get enough invalid signatures to block the repeal from the ballot. So it looks like we’ll be voting on this come November 2012.

This move puts the law’s provisions on hold for the 2011 and 2012 election cycles. The voter suppression law won’t be operative in Ohio for the 2011 election or the 2012 election, because we’ll be voting on whether to repeal it.

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John Lewis is concerned, but I’m well past “troubled”

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Great piece by John Lewis on voting:

Since January, a majority of state legislatures have passed or considered election-law changes that, taken together, constitute the most concerted effort to restrict the right to vote since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act — also known as the Motor Voter Act — made it easier to register to vote, while the 2002 Help America Vote Act responded to the irregularities of the 2000 presidential race with improved election standards. Despite decades of progress, this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation. The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri and nine other states — despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification.

Having fought for voting rights as a student, I am especially troubled that these laws disproportionately affect young voters. Students at state universities in Wisconsin cannot vote using their current IDs (because the new law requires the cards to have signatures, which those do not). South Carolina prohibits the use of student IDs altogether. Texas also rejects student IDs, but allows voting by those who have a license to carry a concealed handgun. These schemes are clearly crafted to affect not just how we vote, but who votes.

John Lewis, a Democrat, is a congressman from Georgia.

If we make it difficult for poor and young people to vote, or, in the case of “provisional” (second-class) ballots, make it difficult to have their votes counted, fewer poor and young people are going to vote and fewer poor and young people are going to have their votes counted.

One wrongfully disenfranchised voter is one too many, but in our country, in our cash-choked system, where moneyed interests already have a hugely outsize political voice relative to their actual numbers fewer poor and young people voting is a flat-out disaster.

So what’s it going to take before this becomes a top-tier issue for ordinary middle class democracy enthusiasts who may not (yet) be directly affected by these laws?

An attempt by conservatives to have portions of the Voting Rights Act declared unconstitutional? The same Voting Rights Act sections that were defended (successfully) by a majority in Congress as recently as 2006?

You got it. Last week, in Arizona.

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Transparency is our goal, right?

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As I’m sure you’re aware by now, because I complained about it constantly, I have a personal interest in the role of Fox News in getting my current governor, John Kasich, elected. The media personalities on Fox (Governor Kasich’s former co-workers) weren’t subtle when promoting candidate Kasich.

Too, Rupert Murdoch is a personal friend and huge donor to his former employee, Governor Kasich.

Call me crazy, but I’m wondering how Fox News can cover Kasich in a fair and balanced fashion. They campaigned for him.

So this is interesting:

Gawker, the popular blog based in New York, is going to court to investigate the relationship between the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.
On Monday, the company and one of its reporters, John Cook, plan to file a civil suit against Mr. Christie’s office to try to obtain records of the communications between the two men. Mr. Cook, who regularly uses freedom of information and open public records acts to ferret out information for his Gawker articles, said the court action represents the first lawsuit filed by Gawker to obtain information.
Mr. Cook had already sent a request to Mr. Christie’s office for any letters, logs of phone calls or records of meetings between Mr. Ailes and Mr. Christie. Mr. Cook asserted that that communications trail should be available under the state’s open public records act, but in mid-June, Mr. Christie’s office said that the records, if they exist, would be exempt upon “executive privilege and well-settled case law.” To Mr. Cook, this was an implication that Mr. Ailes is a confidential adviser to Mr. Christie. After he said so in an article, the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union approached him and offered to take the case.

For Mr. Cook, the lawsuit may be a way to document the personal political engagement of Mr. Ailes, a person whom he has labeled a “propagandist” in repeated articles. In an interview, he asserted that the public has come to recognize that Fox News is an ideological outlet. “The next thing that I would like to be publicly acknowledged is not just that they’re ideological — they’re not just the TV equivalent of The Weekly Standard or something — they are actually a power base within the Republican Party,” he said.Through the lawsuit, Mr. Cook hopes to either obtain the records of contacts between the two men, or, alternatively, to have Mr. Christie’s office explain to a judge why each of the records is confidential. “That,” he said, “would be, in and of itself, a newsworthy outcome.”

I think the Ohio ACLU should follow the New Jersey ACLU. Transparency should certainly be in the interest of a free press, I would think, and last time I looked, Ohio had strong sunshine laws pertaining to public officials.

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Now that he’s admitted it, and he’s the secretary of state, doesn’t he have to do something to prevent it?

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Finally:

The Ohio state Senate was set to consider this week what critics are calling the most restrictive voter identification law in the country. The push for restrictive voter ID measures in the Buckeye state is part of a trend of similar legislation sweeping Republican-controlled legislatures across the country. But Ohio’s measure is so restrictive — it requires the photo IDs to be issued by the state, so voters couldn’t identify themselves with their full Social Security numbers — that it lost the support of Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted.

“I want to be perfectly clear, when I began working with the General Assembly to improve Ohio’s elections system it was never my intent to reject valid votes,” Husted said in a short statement posted on his official website.

“I would rather have no bill than one with a rigid photo identification provision that does little to protect against fraud and excludes legally registered voters’ ballots from counting,” Husted said.

“I do not believe this is in any way a voter suppression issue,” said Tom Niehaus, the Republican President of the Senate. “This is about maintaining the integrity of the voting process.”

The Ohio Secretary of State is now admitting this legislation will “exclude legally registered voter’s ballots from counting”. He’s also denying it was ever his intent to “reject valid votes”. The GOP majority leader is denying “voter suppression”. He “does not believe” this is a voter suppression attempt. Finally. After 10 years of absolute bullshit on voter impersonation fraud, we’re getting down to what’s really going on here.

Don’t get too excited about Secretary of State Husted’s sudden and mystifying attack of conscience. He doesn’t have a great record, and he’s only been in office since January. His behavior in a 2011 case involving provisional ballots doesn’t inspire confidence. Second class (provisional) ballots are less likely to be counted, because provisional ballots introduce an element of pollworker, election employee, and election official discretion that just doesn’t come into play with a first class ballot. The chaotic mess that resulted when a close 2010 Ohio judicial race went to recount (that I’ve described below) is a good example of that.

Briefly, there was a very close race for juvenile judge in a county in Ohio in 2010. The results turned on whether provisional ballots were to be reviewed or excluded. The voters involved cast their provisional ballots correctly but due to pollworker error, those second class “provisional” ballots were accepted at the wrong precinct table. Hundreds of provisional ballots were thrown into question, and they came out of majority Democratic precincts.

It went to court, where conservatives won the right to exclude provisional ballots in the state supreme court. A federal court disagreed, and ordered that a review be conducted to determine whether the votes could be counted. Secretary Husted cast the tie-breaker vote to appeal that federal court decision. The case is complex. It now involves advocates for voters relying on Bush v. Gore – which is always amusing, in a bitter, sad way- to use that absolute piece of garbage decision against conservatives, and it goes on from where I stopped. You may read the details here, here and here.

Provisional ballots were the fail-safe, the back-up, and we were assured by conservative lawyers and judges that the provisional balloting process would prevent the disenfranchisement of valid voters. But provisional balloting is complicated- it involves several additional steps, more than one piece of paper, and lots and lots of pollworker instructions to the voter. Each step introduces the possibility of voter error, pollworker error, or a blatantly partisan discretionary call by an elections official or employee. The supposed “fail-safe” conservatives assured us would protect voting rights doesn’t work as intended, and in truth introduces a whole new set of problems.

If you want to see how bad it can get for voters who are shunted to a second-class ballot, follow the links above and wade through the thousands of pages of legal filings that resulted from one county court judicial race. Each one of those provisional ballots represents a voter, and each and every one of those voters is now at risk of having their vote thrown out, in a race that turned on a 23 vote difference. Every voter that entered that polling place has the right to assume their vote will be treated in a fair and equitable manner, and that’s not happening. Instead, we have a viciously partisan battle that has (so far) involved 4 courts and three conflicting decisions. And, what about the voters who had the misfortune to cast those second class ballots? Where are they in all this? Long forgotten. They don’t matter.

Every time I write about voting rights I get comments asking what Democrats or liberals are doing in states like Ohio to protect voters. There is a conference call for voting enthusiasts scheduled on July 15th, here in Ohio, and, as I mentioned, Vice President Biden raised the issue when he addressed Ohio Democrats last weekend. So, it’s on the radar and there will be a plan to help qualified voters get and vote a first class ballot. How well the plan will work, and how many legitimate votes by disfavored groups will be excluded, I do not know. Conservatives are constantly changing the rules, and it’s always a challenge to keep up with their endlessly creative and novel interpretations of what’s required to vote and have the vote counted.

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