A Reminder: As Per Ohio's "Bipartisan" Election Boards...

[Junkdrawer]

Last night I was trying to remember why I wasn't reassured when I heard that a bipartisan group oversaw the 91 precinct hand recount. Well, today I Googled this:

A major complicating factor in the appropriate allocation of voting machines was the artificially inflated voter registration rolls in the county. The 845,720 registered voters in 2004 actually exceeded the 2000 total voting age population of Franklin County (800,657) by 45,063 persons. This unsettling disparity resulted from the loss, during preperation for computer system changes in anticipation of the year 2000, of voter history data necessary for purging the voter rolls of ineligible voters as required by the National Voter Registration Act. The County chose to start fresh with new voter histories, with the result that there had been no voter purge since 1999. The County resumed regular purging of its voter list only after the 2004 election, and on June 20, 2005 removed approximately 114,000 ineligible individuals from its voter registration list. The 2005 purge brings the voter registration total well below the 2000 voting age population in the county.

Yes, you read that right. Franklin County's "bi-partisan" Board of Election has just now "purged" 114,000 voters from the rolls! Tee-ing things up nicely, it would seem, for many more thousands of voters to find themselves suddenly ineligable to vote when they show up at the polling place in 2006!

Over one hundred thousand voters scrubbed from the voting rolls in just one Ohio County alone by their presumably "bi-partisan" BoE. That, while we have learned over the past several months how these Ohio BoE's are certainly not "bi-partisan" as Blackwell and their other defenders continue to maintain since a) There are "Democrats" on these boards who are specifically plants, in other words, "Democrats" in name only and b) All BoE members serve at the partisan pleasure of the distinctly partisan Secretary of State and Bush/Cheney Co-Chair, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who has routinely threatened BoE members with dismissal if and when they refuse to follow his personal partisan edicts.

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001512.htm

Common Cause has been calling for Independant Election Boards:

INDEPENDENT ELECTION BOARD

How does the current system work?

Ohio elections are currently supervised by the Secretary of State, a partisan elected official. In Ohio and other states, the actions of partisan elections officials have caused concern among many voters that elections are not being run fairly and have cast doubt on the results of close elections.

What would the amendment do?

This constitutional amendment would remove partisanship from the administration of elections and hand it over to an independent elections board. The board’s members would be chosen in a bipartisan manner and would be prohibited from being involved in politics.


The new elections board would have nine members. Board members would serve for nine years, to insulate them from political pressure. The board consists of:

Four members appointed by the governor
Four appointed by members of the general assembly who are members of a different political party than the governor – thus assuring bipartisan representation
One member appointed by a unanimous vote of the chief justice and justices of the Ohio Supreme Court. That person cannot have been affiliated with a political party for the previous ten years, assuring someone who is nonpartisan.
The appointments have these restrictions:

The governor and general assembly must appoint an equal number of men and women and must take into account the geographic regions and racial diversity of the state.
Members of the board may not be elected or appointed government officials, candidates, party officials or registered lobbyists. They must refrain from political activity while in office.
The board will have broad powers to prescribe uniform procedures to be followed by county boards of election, appoint and remove members of those boards, certify ballot language for statewide issues, approve voting equipment and maintain a statewide voter database. The board appoints the state director of elections, who is in charge of running the elections board staff.


http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=880425

[jojo54]

1. My first thought was, get your local grassroots orgs. to put ads

in the most popular newspapers (left OR right) for citizens to inundate the voter registration offices for clarity of their information. I know ads cost money, but this would be well worth spent if you can get the attention of 10K voters whose info was "purged".

On another note, I feel for you guys there. You are getting totally screwed and it seems like there's an invisible force field around the freeps.