After an unexplained FBI raid on a leading voter registration organization in Ohio and an unexplained stampede by Ohio Statehouse Republicans to slap a constitutional amendment on the November ballot (to do what a state law on voter ID already does), alarm spiked among voting rights advocates about surreptitious government tactics to sway the outcome of the November election.
A week ago, a coalition of worried Ohio faith leaders called on Gov. Mike DeWine to reassure their unsettled congregants that the state will protect and secure their right to vote, will not tolerate intimidation or harassment to keep people away from the polls, and will develop a rapid response plan with law enforcement to address any coercion during early voting or on Election Day.
“Our home stands at a moral crossroads,” said Rabbi Sharon Mars of Temple Israel in Columbus. “Do not let our right to vote be morally compromised but let us cast our ballots as free Ohio citizens who care deeply about this place and all that it can become as part of the greatest hope for democracy the world has ever seen.”
Voters sense the nefarious intent by powerful forces to deny enfranchisement to some citizens as the days tick down to the midterms.
But Ohio’s chief elections officer, who is firmly aligned with the Trumpian anti-voting agenda, (built on lies about rampant voter fraud and lies about the 2020 Election) derided those concerns and characterized the assembly of faith leaders gathered to petition the governor for help as “props” engaged in “a hyperbolic publicity stunt.”
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who regularly engages in hyperbolic publicity stunts, ranted in a post on X that “Stoking false hysteria with claims of ‘unprecedented attempts to keep people from voting’ is not voter protection. It is political theater.”
He should know. A principled bulwark against voter disenfranchisement LaRose is not.
So Ohioans who plan to vote in the midterm election and expect their vote to count on Nov. 3 need to a pay attention to what is being done now to undercut both presumptions.
Donald Trump is prepared to “throw everything at the wall to see what sticks” to subvert this election.
His obsession with passage of the “papers please” SAVE America Act — which would force millions of Americans to produce birth certificates/passports (and more documents for married women who changed their names) before being allowed to vote — hit a wall in the U.S. Senate.
Trump was in such a snit about it he refused to sign the largest housing affordability bill in decades that Congress passed last week. It became law without his signature, but the petulant president vowed not to sign any bill unless his gets approved.
Trump’s thoroughly corrupted Department of Justice, conscripted in his war to undermine and interfere in state-run elections, has waged an all-out assault on states to rattle election chiefs with threatening missives to comply or else, relentless demands for sensitive voter files, and, in Ohio, intimidating law enforcement to spook voter registration efforts.
The DOJ pressured LaRose to turn over the confidential data of nearly 8 million voters, (their name, address, date of birth, partial Social Security number, driver’s license).
Many other secretaries of state, who were pressured for the same data, declined to let the Trump justice department get its hands on the personal information of their voters with no transparency or real safeguards to protect their privacy.
Federal courts have overwhelmingly ruled that the DOJ has no legal authority to compel states to release private voter files. But Ohio’s Secretary of State, gave the DOJ everything.
Four weeks ago, the FBI conducted a massive raid of a leading Cleveland-based voter registration group seizing phones, computers, documents, files.
There is still no explanation for the menacing operation that descended on several Ohio cities and included FBI agents showing up at volunteers’ homes on a fishing expedition.
Ohio Democratic U.S. Rep. Shontel Brown, from the Cleveland area, fired off a letter to the FBI director, signed by other Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation, seeking legal justification for the raid.
“It has now been a month of silence from Kash Patel and the FBI,” said Brown, a member of the U.S. House Oversight Committee. “Refusing to answer basic questions is unacceptable and only raises more concerns about the FBI’s actions.”
Last week there was another unexplained provocation from the DOJ — on behalf of the man whose mug hangs from a 30-foot banner on the front of its headquarters.
The department’s civil rights division sent largely identical letters to the chief elections officials in all 50 states threatening to arrest them if noncitizens vote.
You read that right. (Quick reality check: it is illegal for noncitizens to cast a ballot, states already have secure systems in place to prevent noncitizens from voting, who, case in point, don’t.)
The DOJ harangued state election administrators to fix a problem that does not exist — widespread noncitizen voting in American elections.
The threatening letter (to adhere to statutes that have been on the books for decades — and report back in five days) “is another thinly veiled attempt by the Department of Justice to intimidate election officials and coerce compliance with their efforts to unlawfully inject the federal government into states’ constitutional duty to oversee elections,” said Colorado’s secretary state, a sentiment widely shared by election chiefs across the country, excluding LaRose.
LaRose has a fanboy crush on the most corrupt president in U.S. history.
Ohio faith leaders were right to be worried. The assaults on voting are growing. Fast.
The man who tried to steal an election he lost will test the limits of the constitution he swore to uphold. Pay attention. The stakes are too high to take your right to vote for granted.
This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.
