Page 164 - Freedom in the world_Neat

For example, citing an arcane Ohio law, Blackwell for three weeks in September instructed
county election boards to reject any registration applications submitted on paper thinner
than 80-pound stock (most commonly used for postcards). This excluded standard 20-
pound copier paper, used by most Ohioans who printed out their applications from the
secretary of state’s website.59 In a separate effort to purge registration rolls of likely
Democrats, the Ohio Republican Party unlawfully targeted hundreds of thousands of
predominantly minority voters by sending registered mail to their given addresses. If the
letters were not signed and returned, or were returned as undeliverable, those
registrations were challenged.60
Most of the complaints from Ohio concerned the misallocation of voting machines,
resulting in four- to ten-hour lines outside dozens of polling places in Cleveland,
Columbus, and Cincinnati. Many voters were deterred by the long wait and did not cast
ballots. Part of the problem was an overall shortage of voting machines in some parts of
the state. Franklin County, for instance, received only 2,866 machines, despite the fact that
the Election Board’s own analysis indicated that it needed 5,000.61There was also a bias
in the allocation of machines within counties that worked against precincts with
predominately minority and lower-income populations. House Judiciary Committee staff
members received reports that, adjacent to two heavily African American precincts in
Columbus with five- and seven-hour waits, there was a suburban district with just 184
voters per machine and less than a 15-minute wait.62 In the whole of Franklin County,
where Columbus is located, there were 262 registered voters per machine in precincts
with low proportions of African Americans and 324 registered voters per machine in
precincts with a high proportion of African Americans, a difference of 23.7 percent; if
calculated using the Election Board’s measure of “active voters,” the disparity is still 13.6
percent.63
With control of both houses of Congress at stake in the 2006 midterm elections, several
states passed legislation that significantly hindered voter registration drives. In Ohio, the
state legislature passed new laws requiring individual registration workers to personally
submit completed forms to an election office rather than allowing the organization for
which they work to submit them in bulk.64 The new laws hold the workers criminally liable
for any irregularities in the forms. In response to similar laws passed in Florida, the League
of Women Voters halted their voter registration efforts in that state for the first time in 67
years.65 However, a federal judge blocked enforcement of the Florida law, which imposed
fines of between $250 and $5,000 for the “mishandling” of voter registration cards.
In March 2006, Georgia enacted a law requiring voters to show a passport, driver’s
license, or other official form of identification before casting a ballot. In contrast to past
elections, for which any of 17 different types of document could be used as proof of
identity and residency, the new state law would require Georgians lacking government-
issued IDs to purchase a $20 state ID card before voting. A federal judge struck down the
law, likening the requirement to a Jim Crow–era poll tax.66 A subsequent version of the
law eliminated the $20 fee; the Supreme Court is currently considering the validity of a
similar measure in Indiana.
According to press reports in April 2007, a leaked bipartisan study commissioned by the
Election Assistance Commission, a government panel created under HAVA, concluded in
2006 that “there is widespread but not unanimous agreement that there is little polling
place fraud.” Republicans generally insist that voter fraud is widespread and justifies the
voter identification laws that have been passed in at least two dozen states. Democrats, on

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