9
Democracy Under Assault
While faculty across Ohio were trying to fend off the charter university initiative, the Republican legislature launched an attack on yet another front. This time the target was the people’s right to vote—confirmation that there were few ideas so bad that the Republicans in the Ohio legislature would not embrace them.
The Republicans passed several bills in 2011 that were designed to suppress the vote under the guise of eliminating fraud that did not exist. Chief among these was House Bill 194, introduced on April 12, 2011, which was a sweeping assault on voting rights. So seriously did we take this threat that progressive groups in Ohio created a new coalition, Fair Elections Ohio, to launch yet another petition drive. This drive would put HB 194 on the ballot to repeal, just like Senate Bill 5. The long and bitter struggle to defend voting rights in Ohio would carry on right through the 2012 election, as Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted gained a reputation for being the “Secretary of Suppression” because of his untiring efforts to suppress the vote in our presidential battleground state.1
Senate Bill 5 was, then, not just a one-dimensional fight to defend collective bargaining but a major battle in a war launched by right-wing ideologues to create a state as the chamber of commerce or multinational corporations would wish to have it.
Veteran House Republicans and ALEC members Rep. Louis Blessing and Rep. Robert Mecklenborg, both of the Cincinnati area, were the cosponsors of House Bill 194, which became popularly known as the “voter suppression act.” Readers will already know Rep. Blessing as one of the chief proponents of Senate Bill 5. Perhaps there is a certain consistency between trying to deny Ohioans their right to organize as well as their right to vote.
House Bill 194 was a sweeping reduction in the opportunity of Ohioans to vote. It would have cut early voting from 35 days before the election to 21 by mail and 17 in person. Most seriously, it also limited in-person voting before the election by barring it on Saturday afternoons, Sundays, and the three days before the election—the times most people tend to vote early.
A little background is useful to understand why Ohio had expanded the opportunities to vote after the 2004 election and just how ruthless was the attempt by the Ohio Republicans in 2011 to limit those opportunities. The expanded voting in Ohio was created specifically to address the rampant problems of the 2004 presidential election. George W. Bush won the state narrowly in an election filled with delays, extraordinarily long lines, and irregularities—many of which are directly traceable to the biased actions of Republican Ken Blackwell, who was then both Secretary of State in charge of the election and the head of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Drawing on a detailed congressional report titled Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong In Ohio, Mark Crispin of Harper’s Magazine did a carefu