Ohio’s newly elected Secretary of State (SOS) Frank LaRose
sounds surprisingly reasonable and sane for a Republican. Unlike his recently
departed predecessor Jon Husted, who now occupies the state’s Lieutenant
Governor’s office, LaRose seems to understand the voter registration purge problem
in Ohio. Or at least he’s giving lip service to it.
Husted, notorious for removing minorities and the poor from
the Buckeye State voter rolls, ended his tenure with a last great purge worthy
of Stalin. Everyone who had not voted in the last four years was targeted for
removal from Husted’s voting roll.
Could you imagine if they told National Rifle Association
loyalists that “You have to give up your gun – you haven’t used it in four
years” or “You have to give up your concealed carry permit, because you haven’t
carried your weapon in four years”?
Voting should be regarded as a
constitutional right and is the basis of our democracy. LaRose appears to
understand this. He told the Akron Beacon
Journal that Ohio’s voter registration process is “antiquated.” Even more
interesting, LaRose said he “…wants to rely on data the state already collects
but doesn’t share.”
LaRose insisted that the SOS
office should access updated home addresses every time a voter interacts with
the state. In his view, that would include drivers’ licenses, tax filings, or
even buying a fishing license. While Husted targeted urban areas for purging,
where Democratic voters are in abundance, at his swearing in, LaRose denounced
our enemies and named: “racism … and bigotry.”
Husted could never explain why –
in an era of computerized unlimited databases and in a state that requires an
ID to vote – he had to de-register any voter because they failed to vote.
Isn’t it each person’s right to
vote or not to vote?
As the Beacon Journal summarized, LaRose promised a new policy “With
access to those addresses and the dates of interactions with the state, many
people’s voting registrations could hypothetically continue unchallenged until
they die or move out of state.”
LaRose’s respect for the right to
vote is refreshing and long overdue in the Buckeye State.
https://fitrakis.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Suffrage_universel.png432420Fitrakishttps://fitrakis.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/fitrakisprocedit_340-3-300x78.pngFitrakis2019-01-24 23:02:152020-03-19 01:21:55LaRose knows not to purge
Harvey Wasserman interviews investigative reporting partner Bob Fitrakis about the rigged 2016 selection and the inside story of the attempted recount for his weekly radio program, the Solartopia Green Power and Wellness Hour. EON photo
The Woodward and Bernstein of Election Integrity
Every presidential election since 2004, we have traveled to Columbus, in key swing state of Ohio, to video document election protection efforts by Harvey Wasserman, Bob Fitrakis and the Columbus Free Press team (FreePress.org). We made the trip again this year and have just returned from filming post-recount interviews with both of them in Columbus last week.
Harvey Wasserman – an author, historian, celebrated journalist and lifelong activist, and Bob Fitrakis – a practicing attorney who holds doctorates in both political science and law – are also both popular professors in Columbus colleges.
Dubbed by admirer Jesse Jackson as ‘the Woodward and Bernstein of election integrity’ – after the Washington Post reporters that famously broke the Watergate story in the Nixon era – Fitrakis and Wasserman’s research and reporting on election theft has twice won Project Censored awards.
The Free Press and its sponsoring organization the Columbus Institute of Contemporary Journalism (CICJ) has been in operation since 1970 and run since the ‘90s by life-partners Bob Fitrakis and Suzanne Patzer and their colleague Harvey Wasserman. Their work has been a vital epicenter not only of local community organizing and investigative reporting, but also of the national US Election Protection movement.
At the same time, they have either been consistently ignored or repeatedly denounced by mainstream media as “conspiracy theorists.”
Nevertheless, their ground-breaking findings have consistently been validated by subsequent developments. They were unfortunately right on target with their prescient analysis of the 2016 election in their book “The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows and Electronic Election Theft,” published in early 2016, months before the Nov. 8 vote.
For more than a decade, from their unique vantage point in one of the country’s main ground zero’s of vote rigging, they‘ve documented the multiple methods by which America’s elections have been stolen…and helped to galvanize grassroots awareness and resistance not only in Ohio, but across the country.
EON is proud to help give their important work wider exposure. Here are four recent video interviews done as the election saga unfolded, and links to recent articles.
[ In the works: A report from inside the recount saga and post-Electoral College analysis. ]
Losers Win, Winners Lose
Bob Fritakis and Harvey Wasserman on the seriously flawed US voting and electoral college system and the outcome of the 2016 election. The FreePress.org reporting team that Jesse Jackson dubbed the Woodward and Bernstein of Election Protection comment on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and why the American election system needs a total overhaul from top to bottom.
The Illegitimate Election 2016
What are the legitimate grounds for calling the recent election awarding the Presidency to Donald Trump illegitimate? Political scientist and attorney Dr. Robert Fitrakis and investigative historian Harvey Wasserman – editors of FreePress.org – summarize the evidence in this exclusive EON interview.
They are the co-authors of the book STRIP & FLIP SELECTION OF 2016 – Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft, available here – https://freepress.org/store.php
Greg Palast interviews Bob Fitrakis on Voter Purges
How did the Ohio Republican Sec. of State purge and disenfranchise so many voters from the voter rolls? A conversation between Bob Fitrakis and Greg Palast, two of the leading investigative reporters on the many vote rigging methods at work in US elections.
Palast Interviews Fitrakis on Election Theft
Why before the Nov. 8, 2016 election, did Republican authorities in key swing state Ohio turn off the safety features for ballot records even though this security measure is already programmed into their electronic voting machine software?
A conversation between Bob Fitrakis and Greg Palast, two of the leading investigative reporters on the many vote rigging methods at work in US elections.
Sunday, October 2, 2016, the Columbus Dispatch reported that Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted refused to mail absentee ballot applications to over one million Ohio voters.
Husted refused to mail to 1,035,795 registered voters. Those left off Husted’s mailing list include 650,730 registered voters who had changed their address. Of these, 568,456 moved within the Buckeye State and are still eligible to vote. The other 82,274 moved out of state and are presumably ineligible to vote.
The key target of Husted’s deregulation scheme are the remaining 385,065 voters who are registered at their current residence but simply failed to vote in the 2012 or 2014 federal elections.
Husted has had these voters harassed by their local Boards of Elections sending them letters demanding they verify their address. Failure to do so could lead to the voters’ deregistration and has led to them not being offered an absentee ballot. Social science data shows that the crux of Democratic Party voters move more often and vote less often than Republicans. Husted’s strategy is to purge poor and minority voters from Ohio rolls.
A U.S. federal court had recently blocked Husted’s strategy of just outright mass purging minority, young and mostly Democratic voters. A recent 2-1 ruling by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals halted various Husted practices including the removal of any voter who hadn’t voted in six years in Ohio, even if they remained at the same address.
However, the ruling did not block Husted from doing an end-run by using the absentee ballot application mailing to eventually deregister voters.
Husted has never been able to explain why, in a state that requires ID at the polls to verify a voter’s address, any voter would be removed from the computerized voting rolls. There’s no logical reason other than partisan politics to purge a registered voter in a computer era.
Overall, Republican Husted has targeted 13 percent of Ohio’s registered voters for absentee ballot disenfranchisement.
Also, voters who received Husted’s absentee ballot application mailing may have noticed the specific instructions on the envelope to the post office not to forward the mail to a new address, although the post office can return it to the sender. Husted’s office has used the return of two pieces of mail intended for the same voter to the secretary of state’s office or county board of elections as a reason to purge that voter.
Husted also admitted to the Dispatch that some of his absentee ballot applications got lost in the mail. Husted, who claims to be a fiscal conservative and has in the past refused to have backup paper ballots at polling sites because of the cost, cannot seem to explain why he is mailing more than 6.5 million absentee voting applications anyway.
Husted has allowed his office and the county boards of elections, without explanation, to disable their electronic audit logs that are built into central tabulators as well as certain county ballot scanning machines.
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Harvey Wasserman interviews investigative reporting partner Bob Fitrakis about the rigged 2016 selection and the inside story of the attempted recount for his weekly radio program, the 
