Hat Tip to CJ at LGF
Andrew Cohen has a story up on The Atlantic talking about a late game change by the GOP in a rather blatant attempt to supress the vote in Ohio:
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Voter advocates are criticizing an order by Ohio's elections chief dealing with the casting of provisional ballots. Advocates are saying on Saturday that the order by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted late Friday wrongly puts the burden of recording the form of ID used on a provisional ballot on voters, not pollworkers ...
Specifically, if you go to vote, and you get a provisional ballot, the new rules state that
you are required to write down what form of ID you use, not the poll workers.
"The bottom line is that (Secretary of State Jon Husted) designed a form that violates Ohio law by improperly shifting to voters the poll workers' information-recording responsibilities regarding ID to voters, and then he wants to trash votes where there is a problem with the form on the section he misassigned to voters," said Cleveland attorney Subodh Chandra, who filed the motion ....
Husted spokesman Matt McClellan said the Friday directive actually was designed to concur with the Oct. 26 order of U.S. District Court Judge Algenon Marbley in a legal dispute over provisional ballots. "We wanted to make sure we complied with those directions," McClellan said. Voters will complete the same form they did in the March primary and August special elections. We're not doing anything new," he said. "Voters have to provide ID when they vote provisionally."
Why is this a big deal?
Well, it's kinda simple. There are less than 2 days left until the election. There is no way at all that people are going to know that they are going to need to do this at the voting booth.
The poll workers won't know -- and if they're GOP operatives, they won't volunteer the information, or might even lie about it.
The actual voters won't know -- especially if they're lower class, where TV / Radio / etc aren't always options for getting information out.
The lawyers for OFA and Voting Rights activists will know -- but there's only so many of them to go around.
Under Ohio state law, the poll worker is supposed to take down your ID, and if there's a mistake it can be corrected. What the GOP is trying to do is make the voters take down the information and if it's wrong, oh well, your vote doesn't count.
All of this is the result of the same GOP operative, Jon Husted, who reduced the number of Ohio Early Voting weekends from 5 to 1, in an attempt to supress the minority vote.
In short, we have two days left, and the GOP's hail mary is to try and disenfranchise millions of voters. It's sad to say, but this is becoming standard operating procedure for them.
11:24 AM PT: ThinkProgress has an article on this up here as well.