F.O.P.s

FOR LEWIS CARROLL AND THE CHILDREN
(Walt Kelly)
The gentle journey jars to halt;
The drifting dream is done.
The deadly, that we thought were dead,
Stand waiting, every one.

The Ohio House of Representatives wants to have the 2008 coup d'etat in the bag before the Christmas recess.

Elections in Ohio are already a Russian mobster's wet dream, with J. Kenneth "Not-the-Best-Dressed-List" Blackwell as Secretary of State, 250 GOP vote challengers assigned to slow up predominately black polling places, Diebold voting machines in place and enough gerrymandering to elect Atilla the Hun as Pope.

House Bill 3 exempts electronic voting machines from public scrutiny. Our friend Emily Hanavan was one of those Oberlin college students who stood in line 5 hours or more because of a shortage of voting machines delivered to liberal colleges in Ohio. (Most ordered pizza and played guitars.) Electronic voting machines-- of which there aren't enough anyway-- will be exempt from recounts by random sampling under HB 3, even in a close, disputed elections.

It raises the cost of a citizen-requested recount from $10 per precinct to $50 per precinct-- a recount in 2006 or 2008 will cost more than $500,000. HB3 makes it illegal to challenge any federal federal election result in Ohio, including presidential elections.

This year, four ballot initiatives for election reform were defeated in Ohio after polls showed at least two of them would pass. On Sunday before the Tuesday 2005 election, Columbus Dispatch polls predicted that Issue Two would pass by a vote of 59% to 33%, with about 8% undecided.

The official vote count on Tuesday showed Issue Two failing with only 36.5% in favor and 63.5% opposed. If this is true, then half of the people who said they would support Issue Two voted against it two days later.

The newspaper's poll showed reform Issue Three winning with 61% for, 25% opposed and 14% undecided. When the vote came on Tuesday, 33% of the votes were in favor, with 67% opposed.

My good friend Pamela J. started this with a link from Truthout.org , and you could use the search engine at the General Accounting Office for reports on electronic voting.

Why do you think we call them F.O.P.s? Remember when we used to mock Russian elections?