Blackwell's dual roles draw fire:Candidate is also top elections official

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1149755496195350.xml&coll=2

Blackwell's dual roles draw fire
Candidate is also top elections official

Thursday, June 08, 2006
Ted Wendling
Plain Dealer Bureau

Columbus -- Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's dual roles as Republican nominee for governor and the man responsible for ensuring a fair and impartial election in November have subjected him to an avalanche of criticism this week.

Pilloried by voter-registration groups for drafting new rules that they say are intended to suppress the poor-, black- and Democratic vote, Blackwell also is being threatened with a lawsuit for Ohio's failure to enforce the national "motor voter" law.

Viewing the battle from afar, the New York Times weighed in Wednesday with a lead edit orial titled "Block the Vote, Ohio Remix." The Times labeled Ohio's election system "corrupt" and called for Blackwell to relinquish all duties pertaining to this fall's election.

That's not going to happen, Carlo LoParo, Blackwell's spokesman, angrily replied. He ripped the Times and said Democrats and left-leaning voter-registration groups were hypocrites...



Blackwell remains hyperactive
Thursday, June 08, 2006

http://www.cleveland.com/politics/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1149755674195350.xml&coll=2


...Blackwell's latest ploy is couched in an extremely narrow interpretation of House Bill 3, a recently passed election reform measure. The bill, championed by Republican legislative leaders and signed into law by Gov. Bob Taft, purportedly is designed to eradicate vote fraud.

But Blackwell is using the new law to draft highly restrictive voter registration rules that tightly govern the work of groups engaged in mass registration drives. Registrars could be subject to felony prosecution for violations.

Most disturbing to many election activists is Blackwell's insistence that completed registration forms be returned by the registrar directly to a county board of elections - and not to any of the legitimate organizations, like public libraries and the League of Women Voters, that regularly encourage voter registration.

Blackwell must stop acting in ways that leave the clear impression that he is trying to drive down voter turnout in the fall. Otherwise, he runs the risk of this newspaper and others joining the growing chorus of those calling for him either to step aside as secretary of state, or to hand over election-related duties to someone who will act in the best interest of all Ohioans.





Editorial

Block the Vote, Ohio Remix

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/opinion/07wed1.html?ex=1149825600&en=c29e51ab1bda5605&ei=5087%0A

Published: June 7, 2006
If there was ever a sign of a ruling party in trouble, it is a game plan that calls for trying to win by discouraging voting.

The latest sign that Republicans have an election-year strategy to shut down voter registration drives comes from Ohio. As the state gears up for a very competitive election season this fall, its secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, has put in place "emergency" regulations that could hit voter registration workers with criminal penalties for perfectly legitimate registration practices. The rules are so draconian they could shut down registration drives in Ohio.

Mr. Blackwell, who also happens to be the Republican candidate for governor this year, has a history of this sort of behavior. In 2004, he instructed county boards of elections to reject any registrations on paper of less than 80-pound stock — about the thickness of a postcard. His order was almost certainly illegal, and he retracted it after he came under intense criticism. It was, however, in place long enough to get some registrations tossed out.

This year, Mr. Blackwell's office has issued rules and materials that appear to require that paid registration workers, and perhaps even volunteers, personally take the forms they collect to an election office. Organizations that run registration drives generally have the people who register voters bring the forms back to supervisors, who can then review them for errors. Under Mr. Blackwell's edict, everyone involved could be committing a crime. Mr. Blackwell's rules also appear to prohibit people who register voters from sending the forms in by mail. That rule itself may violate federal elections law...


Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''...


So Dark the Con of Ken
Blackwell Sins In '04 Coming Back To Haunt Him

http://www.freetimes.com/story/285

So Dark the Con of Ken
Blackwell's Sins In '04 Are Coming Back To Haunt Him

Published June 7th, 2006

Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell rigged the 2004 election for President Bush, says an article written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. So it's not exactly breaking news. Ohio reporters have exposed the various ways Blackwell intentionally suppressed votes that would have gone to Democratic candidate John Kerry. But Kennedy packages every nefarious tactic into one tight article that leaves any intelligent reader asking, "Duuuuude! What the fuck?"...

Are we really that stupid? The Ohio Republican Party thinks so.

"Oh come on, it's a bunch of garbage," says Ohio GOP spokesman John McClelland, about the Rolling Stone article. "It is a bunch of fiction. We don't spend a lot of time talking about conspiracy theories." McClelland says research by Democrats even shows there was no effort to suppress Ohio votes in 2004.

"That is untrue," says Democratic National Committee spokesman Damien LaVera. "What we found is there were significant problems with the vote in 2004. They're trying to manipulate the findings. Republicans believe the fewer people who vote the better it is for their party. Whether it's voter ID laws or Blackwell's tactics, the fact is they work to keep the turnout down. It's not good for democracy and it's not good for the country."...


Regents lend Blackwell their ears
Trustees also hear Strickland stand-ins

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/114966906728850.xml&coll=2

Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Reginald Fields and Sandy Theis
Plain Dealer Bureau

Columbus -- Some of Ohio's most powerful and connected business leaders sit on university boards of trustees, and they gathered Tuesday to hear from both candidates for governor.

But only one showed up for the Ohio Board of Regents' annual Statewide Trustees' Conference.

Democrat Ted Strickland sent his wife and his policy adviser, who said the candidate had a previous commitment at Lorain County Community College.

The audience groaned...



Strickland turns up missing

http://www.cleveland.com/politics/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1149755687195350.xml&coll=2

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Ted Strickland missed a crucial opportu nity Tuesday, while Ken Blackwell made the most of one.

And if Strickland, Ohio's Democratic gubernatorial nominee, expects to compete against GOP rival Blackwell this fall, the campaign cannot afford to make such basic mistakes.

Blackwell, whose proposals to limit state spending have made fierce enemies among higher education advocates, had no hesitation about facing critics Tuesday at a statewide conference of college and university trustees. The candidate backed away not one bit from his calls for fiscal restraint, yet still managed to sound themes welcome to the audience. He called for significant measures to save colleges money on construction, for example, and emphasized the importance of higher education to Ohio's economy.

Strickland? He wasn't there...



Law limiting state spending not enforceable, report says

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1149755530195350.xml&coll=2

Thursday, June 08, 2006
Sandy Theis
Plain Dealer Bureau

Columbus - Ohio's new law to limit state spending is unenforceable, according to a new analysis by legislative researchers.

The report comes one week after the GOP-dominated legislature crafted a state spending cap that allows Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell to back away from his broader plan to curb government spending with a constitutional amendment.

When widespread criticism of the amendment threatened Blackwell's campaign, lawmakers passed an alternative.

Such legislative analyses normally are requested and produced before a bill is signed into law, but the spending cap measure debuted one day and won final approval the next...

Shouldn't any official who oversees elections have to step down if they decide to run for another office?

And he's going to keep doing it as long as he has power and until he gets his 6 month prison sentence slap on the wrist and then declared a hero by the Republican leadership after which he gets his golden parachute retirement "job".

Why in the HADES does Ohio allow this BS??? How is he getting away with this?? :mad: :argh:

what's the historical origin of the downstate RW/corrupt culture?

I long had thought that the belt near the lake was the whole nature of Ohio.

eg, Toledo.. Cleveland {Kucinich}.. nearby Homestead iron works in PA.

SOS Dean Heller is running for a seat in Congress!! Forced Sequoias on Nevadans everywhere except in Las Vegas where the Sequoias are 12 years old and have not printers nor anyway to verify individual votes AND served as George Bush's re-election campaign co-chair with Governor Kenny Guinn. He's running against a gubernatorial candidate's wife for a seat in Congress.

position. It's a blatant CONFLICT OF INTEREST. How's bout better yet, YOU'RE DISQUALIFIED you wretched lying thief!