OH: BLACK COMMUNITIES HAD VOTING MACHINES MOVED
AND
STOOD IN LINES FOR HOURS OR HAD TO GIVE UP WHILE RICH
WHITE PEOPLE EASILY VOTED
As Ken Urban of Counterpunch and
Bob
Fithrakis of the Columbus Free Press
have reported, Franklin County Ohio gives the clearest example of how
election officials in Ohio boosted Republican vote tallies and
suppressed
Democratic totals. They just distributed the voting machines so that
wealthy white Republicans could vote efficiently and working class
black
Democrats had to wait for hours to vote, as did college students and
many
other people in Democratic areas.
Document reveals Columbus, Ohio voters waited
hours as
election officials held back machines
|
| November 16, 2004 |
Jeff Graessle, Franklin County Election Operations Division Manager,
told
the Citizen’s Alliance for Secure Elections (CASE) Ohio voting rights
activists that Franklin County does not use a simple 100 votes per
machine guideline. Rather, they allocated their machines in the 2004
election based on a new criteria determined by ACTIVE registered
voters.
Hence, an affluent area like Upper Arlington which has shown a
consistent
pattern of voters is rewarded with more machines and fewer losses. A
less
affluent area of Columbus where voters miss voting at more elections
and
may only come out in a hotly tested election, like Bush-Kerry, are
punished with fewer machines.
Of course, there’s a direct correlation between affluence and votes for
Bush and below medium income areas and votes for Kerry. Franklin
County,
Ohio’s formula served to disenfranchise disproportionately poor,
minority
and Democratic voters under the guise of rewarding the “likely” voter
or
active registered voters.
--
Bob Fitrakis is a Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences
Department at Columbus State Community College. He has a Ph.D in
Political Science and a J.D. from The Ohio State University Law School.
He is the author of seven books, an investigative reporter, and Editor
of
the Columbus Free Press (freepress.org). He has won ten major
investigative journalism awards including Best Coverage of Politics in
Ohio from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists. He served as an
international election observer in the 1994 presidential elections in
El
Salvador and was the co-author and editor of the report to the United
Nations. He served as legal advisor for eight polling locations on
Columbus' Near East Side for the Election Protection Coalition.