Arizona 2016 = Ohio 2004

Arizona 2016

Last week's primary election in Arizona gave me flashbacks.  You may have seen the reports of lines around the block and hours-long waits at voting locations in Phoenix.  Reminded me instantly of Ohio in 2004.

Phoenix is the biggest city in Arizona.  It has a non-white, Democratic majority.  It's in the otherwise white, Republican-majority Maricopa County (think asshole Sheriff Joe Arpaio).  For the primary, election officials in Maricopa County slashed the number of polling places by 70 percent!  In 2012, the county operated 200 polling locations.  For 2016, they're going to run with just 60.  The greatest reductions were in urban, non-white parts of Phoenix.  County population is up slightly in the past four years.

Until a 2013 Supreme Court ruling, Arizona elections operated under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Justice Dept., and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.  But that part of the Act was unwisely voided by the Roberts Court.  Now that GOP election overlords in Arizona are free from federal oversight, voter suppression is the first order of business. Sixteen states now have voting restrictions in place that did not exist in 2012.  The Arizona primary was just a warm-up for what the GOP has planned for the November general election across the nation.


We've seen this many times before.  One memorable time for me was the 2004 general election here in Ohio.  That was the last time I ever voted in person.

John Kerry was challenging the incumbent idiot George W. Bush.  It was going to be a close one and Ohio, as always, was going to be key to the outcome.  The Republicans got busy.  An amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage -- guaranteed to fire up the dumb-ass "base" -- was part of it, but, oh, there was more.

In 2004, most of the touch-screen voting machines in use across Ohio were made by Diebold of Canton, Ohio.  The chairman of the Ohio Committee to Reelect George W. Bush was none other than Diebold's CEO Walden O'Dell, who publicly promised to "deliver Ohio" to Bush.  (At the time, O'Dell's machines did not provide a paper trail.)

The co-chair of that same committee was Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, the top election official in Ohio.  Blackwell took voter suppression to shameless heights.  He refused to accept new-voter registration cards unless they were printed on heavy card-stock.  He ruthlessly purged the voter rolls without good reason.  As many as 1 in 4 registered Ohio voters discovered that their names had been removed from the list of eligible voters.  In Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo, over 300,000 names were scrubbed.  Blackwell reduced the number of polling places in Democratic-majority areas, and reduced the number of voting machines in virtually every precinct.  Here in Franklin County, the Board of Elections estimated 5000 machines would be needed for the 2004 election.  The Republican Board chairman decided to make do with half that number.

Ohio 2004

Predictably, and by design, many Ohioans spent hours waiting in line to vote on that miserable, rainy November day.  I know, because I was one of them.  At two hours, my wait was shorter than lots of folks.  Many people in those long lines simply gave up after awhile and left without voting.  I know, because I saw it happen repeatedly.

In all my years, I'd never seen anything even close to it before.  It was a real out-lier.  Lou Harris, founder of the Harris Poll and the father of modern political polling, said, "Ohio in 2004 was as dirty an election as America has ever seen."  Old Lou was right.  Something was rotten in the state of Ohio.  It was obvious.  Dubya was declared a narrow "winner," but just a small slice of those disenfranchised, largely Democratic voters would have tipped the state to Kerry, and the White House with it.  This was not to be.

That's when I vowed to never again waste my time with in-person voting, and I haven't.  Any form of voting is an act of faith, and since 2004 I've placed my faith in the absentee ballot.  And yes, I know, the SOB's could toss my ballot in the trash, but at least I don't have to wait in line to be cheated.

2016 will be another biggie, a battle, a pivotal national election with compelling candidates offering distinctly different choices.  Arizona and other states have already shown how willing they are to brazenly tilt the playing field.  Ohio has another Republican Secretary of State, Jon Husted, whose record on voting rights is weak.

One would hope that Husted could pretend to be non-partisan and simply administer the election, rather than throw it.  History, however, suggests a healthy amount of skepticism would be appropriate.



Screw Stalin!  Keep the faith and vote.