The rethugs have all of their pieces to the puzzle nearly in place, and when they finish our democracy will be dead. House Bill 3 just passed in the Ohio House of Representatives, and is set to pass in the Senate. The bill actually makes it illegal to challenge a presidential vote count, or any federal election result. It also exempts electronic voting machines from public scrutiny. Similar bills are being written in Indiana and Georgia. How long will it be before this bill pops up in every rethuglican held House and Senate all over the country?
The rethugs know that they can't hold onto power forever under the current rules, so they are doing what they always do, they are changing the rules to the game to suit them. This time though, it isn't just about them changing the rules, it's about them killing off our democracy for our foreseeable future. They don't seem to want to let go of the power that they have become accustomed to, and it now appears they are willing to wreck the democracy of our nation to maintain it.
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With new legislation, Ohio Republicans plan holiday burial for American Democracy
By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
Online Journal Guest Writers
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1607snip-
House Bill 3 has already passed the Ohio House of Representatives and is about to be approved by the Republican-dominated Senate, probably before the holiday recess. Republicans dominate the Ohio legislature thanks to a heavily gerrymandered crazy quilt of rigged districts, and to a moribund Ohio Democratic Party.
HB3's most publicized provision will require positive identification before casting a vote. But it also opens voter registration activists to partisan prosecution, exempts electronic voting machines from public scrutiny, quintuples the cost of citizen-requested statewide recounts and makes it illegal to challenge a presidential vote count or, indeed, any federal election result in Ohio. When added to the recently passed HB1, which allows campaign financing to be dominated by the wealthy and by corporations, and along with a Rovian wish list of GOP attacks on the ballot box, democracy in Ohio could be all but over.
The GOP is ramming similar bills through state legislatures around the US, starting with Georgia and Indiana. The ID requirements in particular have provoked widespread opposition from newspapers such as the New York Times. The Times, among others, argues that the ID requirements and the costs associated with them, constitute an unconstitutional discriminatory poll tax.
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Fixing the Game
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/opinion/05mon1.htmlsnip-
The rules of American democracy say every president may install his own team of like-minded people in the government - even at a place like the Justice Department, which is at its root a law-enforcement agency and not a campaign branch office. But the Bush administration seems to be losing sight of the fact that the rules also say the majority party of the moment may not use its powers to strip citizens of their rights, politicize the judicial system or rig the election process to keep itself in office.
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Mr. Bush and his team don't understand that they merely hold the current majority in a system designed to bring periodic changes in the governing party and to protect the rights and values of the minority party. The idea that the winners should trash the system to make sure the democratic process ended with them was discredited back around the time of the Bolsheviks.