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Citizens' Alliance for Secure Elections Press Release:
Ohio Senate Rules Committee DEPRIVES VOTERS OF RIGHTS
AND IGNORES THE REAL THREAT OF ELECTION FRAUD --
ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES.
H.B. 3 Ignores all Citizen Input in Passing H.B. 3:
CASE Ohio, Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections,
www.caseohio.org, warns of Increased Voter
Disenfranchisement, the Dangers of Electronic Voting
Machines, and the Unconstitutionality of Denying the
Right to Register Voters and Challenge Election
Results.
COLUMBUS, OH - THE OHIO SENATE RULES COMMITTEE
DEPRIVED OHIO VOTERS OF RIGHTS AND IGNORED THE REAL
THREAT OF ELECTION FRAUD -- ELECTRONIC VOTING
MACHINES. On December 7, 2005, (ISN"T THAT THE
ANNIVERSARY OF PEARL HARBOR? IF SO WE SHOULD REFERENCE
THAT AMERICANS WERE ATTACKED AGAIN) the Rules
Committee of the Ohio Senate approved H.B. 3 despite
months of strong opposition from voting rights groups
such as CASE, the League of Women Voters, (name other
groups) and myriad individuals. The four Democrat
committee members refused to take part in the final
vote and walked out to protest the Republican
steamrolling of their legislative colleagues and the
public.
HB 3 requires, among other things, that voters present
a current, government-issued ID with a current
address. This requirement alone will affect hundreds
of thousands of voters and will disenfranchise many
tens of thousands of them. Students, the elderly,
youth, the homeless, and recently moved families will
be required to produce alternate forms of ID. The
result will be confusion, frustration, discouragement,
and possibly anger directed toward the Ohio Senators
who forced this bill into law.
HB 3 also makes it impossibly difficult for voting
advocacy organizations to register new voters by
making the process extremely slow and expensive and
punishing workers who make a mistake with the threat
of a felony penalty. Workers who could be working
state-wide to register voters are now required to
register with every Board of Elections in the state,
take a test from every board, and return any
registration to the board of the newly registered
voter, as opposed to mailing the registrations in.
This makes registration drives at gatherings like the
Ohio State Fair and similar events impossible.
HB 3 also, in a deadly move, removes a process to
audit the electronic voting machines, the touchscreen
"black box" machines, which are proven to be prone to
errors and susceptible to hacking, as recognized by
the recent General Accounting Office (GAO) report, GAO
05-956 "Federal Efforts to Improve Security and
Reliability of Electronic Voting Systems Are Under
Way, but Key Activities Need to Be Completed."
HB 3 has destroyed voters' rights to challenge
election results.
The Republicans in the Ohio legislature, while
focusing their efforts on prohibiting access to voter
registration and voting, failed to address the real
threat of election fraud - Electronic Voting Machines.
The General Accounting Office, (GAO) recently released
a scathing107 page report on electronic voting
machines in our country. The report supports what
CASE has been claiming for the past two years - that
electronic voting machines are not secure, not
accountable, not transparent, not accurate, and not
certifiable. A bipartisan panel, which included both
Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and
Democratic Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) released a
joint news release regarding the GAO report. Most
community news sources have not yet made these
important findings widely available to the public.
CASE advises all Ohio voters to call, email, or FAX
your State Senator today to tell them not to support
HB 3.
CASE advises all Ohio voters to attend the Senate
session at the Ohio Statehouse Tuesday, December 13,
to sit in the gallery while the full Senate considers
the passage of HB 3, at 1:30 PM.
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