Hearings in Ohio tell of thousands disenfranchised

Jam-packed hearings on voting problems in Ohio on November 13 focused on the hours-long waits inflicted primarily on young and African-American voters. Many of those who testified charged that the grueling lines, some as long as eleven hours, may have prevented thousands of primarily Democratic voters from voting.

Among the most painful stories recorded by Harvey Wasserman, an editor at The Free Press, and Bob Fitrakis, who moderated the hearings, was that of a woman whose husband died at home during the long hours she was stuck in line waiting to vote. But more damning of the election results was the Reverend Werner Lange's testimony: “I estimate, by the way, that over 8,000 votes from the African American community in the city of Youngstown alone, with its 84 precincts, were lost due to insufficient voting machines, and that would translate to some 7,000 votes lost for John Kerry for president in Youngstown alone. . . .”

Most damning of all was the charge that Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth “Katherine Harris” Blackwell and Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matt Damschroder engaged in a concerted effort to disenfranchise African-American and youth voters. Blackwell, like Katherine Harris in Florida in 2000, was both in charge of administering the elections and co-chair of Bush’s Ohio re-election campaign. Damschroder is former head of Franklin County’s Republican party. A Common Cause attorney at the hearings entered into the record spreadsheets from Franklin County showing that while voters were waiting for hours, 68 machines sat in storage, unused. “An analysis of the Franklin County Board of Elections’ allocation of machines reveals a consistent pattern of providing fewer machines to the Democratic city of Columbus, with its Democratic mayor and uniformly Democratic city council, despite increased voter registration in the city. The result was an obvious disparity in machine allocations compared to the primarily Republican white affluent suburbs,” Fitrakis writes.

According to Fitzrakis and Wasserman, after the hearings, “The unavoidable conclusion is that this year's election in Ohio was deeply flawed, that thousands of Ohioans were denied their right to vote, and that the ultimate vote count is very much in doubt.”

Fitrakis is a lawyer with the Alliance for Democracy, which as I mentioned in a previous post is challenging the Ohio election results (and requesting donations to support the litigation).