Republican Secretary of State Blackwell is in full retreat mode:
Last night, a spokesman for Blackwell denied that the GOP officeholder was trying to prevent people from voting and said county boards should accept voter registration forms on paper of any weight as long as they are otherwise valid.
“We’re not the paper police. We’re not going to go to county election boards and review voter registration forms,” said Blackwell spokesman Carlo LoParo. “We want them to process the forms.”
But LoParo disputed suggestions that Blackwell was reversing his Sept. 7 directive, which states that “any Ohio form not printed on this minimum paperweight is considered to be an application for a registration form. Your board should mail this appropriate form to the person listed on the application.” […]
LoParo said Blackwell wants election officials to process the lightweight registration forms and send the applicants a form on heavier-stock paper to return for a permanent record.
That was news to election officials in two counties, who said they have not been processing forms on underweight papers, per Blackwell’s directive.
(Via Kos).
Meanwhile, the Times is reporting that there’s probably going to be trouble counting overseas ballots this year. Oy.
As you may recall, Jeb Bush’s minions got caught earlier this year trying to purge felons from Florida’s voting rolls – using a purge list that didn’t purge any Hispanics (who, in Florida, tend to vote Republican) but purged lots and lots of Blacks (who tend to vote Democrat). Legal Fiction points out that there’s quite a lot of evidence that this was done deliberately.
Via Alsis, this Counterpunch article reports on some of the dirty tricks Democratic Secretary of State Bradbury used to keep Nader off of the Oregon ballot. This is remarkably scummy, anti-democratic stuff. Here’s just one example:
In addition, Bradbury discarded 2,354 county-verified voter signatures (out of the 18,186 submitted to him), because they were on sheets filed with the county elections officers without sequential sheet numbers on them. Employees of the Secretary of State could provide no instance of this ever being applied to reject nominating petitions. Further, the manager of the Nader campaign testified at trial, using his log of notes, that he had been submitting the sheets with sequential sheet numbers until being advised by Bradbury’s office late in the process that he should stop numbering the sheets. That employee testified that she did not recall the conversation but that she had more than once provided incorrect advice to candidates and that the resulting violations of written rules were waived by Bradbury. But no waiver for Nader.
The idea that democracy is more important than winning any particular election contest just seems foreign to too many high elected officials.
Damn, we Cincinnatians have a bad record of picking our mayors! First Jerry Springer, now Ken Blackwell.
I’m not kidding – Jerry Springer was our mayor, before he went into serious local TV news in Chicago, and later into The Show. Now he has an opera written about him – dying to see it.
There’s also some controversy brewing in Colorado, where Secretary of State Donetta Davidson (Repub, natch) is allowing provisional ballots cast at the incorrect polling place to count for the presidential race but not the Senate, which is very close and could determine the control of the Senate. Colorado’s Common Cause is suing her.