The Obama campaign took this to court and won. There seems to be a trend here; Federal courts are overturning or blocking Republican attempts to suppress the rights of potential Democratic voters in almost all of the cases presented in court. In Texas, Florida, and Ohio – Federal courts have ruled against conservative attempts to suppress the vote.
This is something unique to the Republican party – there has not been one case go to federal court that I’m aware of where Republicans tried to expand the rights of voters but Democrats were found to be obstructing that right. With the exception of gerrymandering which occurs on both sides – it is clear that the Republican party alone is responsible for its intent to suppress one of the most important Constitutionally protected rights that American citizens possess – the right to vote.
Talking Points Memo has the story HERE:
U.S. District judge Peter C. Economus ruled that “restoring in-person early voting to all Ohio voters through the Monday before Election Day does not deprive UOCAVA voters from early voting.”
“Instead, and more importantly, it places all Ohio voters on equal standing,” Economus ruled. He said the state ”fails to articulate a precise, compelling interest in establishing the 6 p.m. Friday deadline as applied to non-UOCAVA voters and has failed to evidence any commitment to the ‘exception’ it rhetorically extended to UOCAVA voters.”
And this is a huge, huge deal because Ohio is THE tipping point state. Nate Silver at 538 at the NY Times says this about Ohio HERE:
The broader point is simply that Ohio is so important to the electoral calculus that it’s good news for a candidate when a polling firm shows him doing relatively well there compared with the other states that it polls. Ohio has a 30 percent chance of being the tipping-point state, meaning that it would cast the decisive votes in the Electoral College. That’s as much as the next two states on the list, Florida and Virginia, combined. It’s also as much as Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Michigan and North Carolina combined.
All of these states are competitive. But really, they exist along a continuum of electoral power rather than falling into binary categories of “important” and “unimportant.” Ohio is at the extreme end of that continuum.
The reason our tipping-point calculus rates Ohio so highly is because it would usually suffice to provide Mr. Obama with a winning map, even if he lost many of those other states. If you give Ohio to Mr. Obama, plus all the states where the forecast model now estimates that he has at least 75 percent chance of winning, he’s up to 265 electoral votes. That means he could win any one of Colorado, Virginia, Iowa, Wisconsin, Florida or North Carolina to put him over the top.
Even though there have been only TEN documented cases of in person voter fraud in twelve years in the entire country according to this study HERE – the Republican party continues to push these illegal measures. And it is clear to any fair, objective person that they are doing this to win politically. A recent GOP official in Ohio said this HERE:
I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine. Let’s be fair and reasonable.
When President Obama’s campaign sought court action to extend 3 days of early voting for all Ohio citizens … Mitt Romney’s response was that President Obama was trying to strip voting rights from military veterans. This guy actually said this HERE:
“President Obama’s lawsuit claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period is an outrage.”
Total garbage of course. We’ve covered more on this story in Ohio HERE if you need to get caught up.
