Well, strange and spurious political sham has finally invaded my email. Today, I received an unsolicited email from a Paul Revere (hmmm...) of Shelbyville, Indiana, inviting me to follow his group of purported Senator Hillary Clinton supporters and join them in disparaging commentary on Senators Obama and Biden. Their website is chock full of lies and inuendos and would likely make Senator Clinton ill to have her name associated with them.
Will they never listen? Do they not hear? We must get Barack and Joe elected! It appears some things, like hate and bigotry, may never entirely be eradicated. But the Obama-Biden ticket is the only one that can change our country, making it better, stronger, more livable, and returning us to a place of respect in the world.
The Cincinnati Enquirer has a story about dirty tricks in Ohio intended to influence the election there. The McCain campaign printed a form on which a voter can request an absentee ballot and sent out about 1 million of them. The form included an unnecessary box asking if the voter was eligible to vote. If the voter didn't notice the box and didn't check it, he or she is in fact admitting that he or she is not eligible and the application has to be rejected by law. Secretary of state Jennifer Brunner is hopping mad about this stunt but she is required by law to reject invalid applications.
The widespread practice of students’ registering to vote at their college address has set off a fracas in Virginia, a battleground state in the presidential election.
Late last month, as a voter-registration drive by supporters of Senator Barack Obama was signing up thousands of students at Virginia Tech, the local registrar of elections issued two releases incorrectly suggesting a range of dire possibilities for students who registered to vote at their college.
The releases warned that such students could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns, a statement the Internal Revenue Service says is incorrect, and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents’ car and health insurance.
After some inquiries from students and parents, and more pointed questions from civil rights lawyers, the state board of elections said Friday that it was “modifying and clarifying” the state guidelines on which the county registrar had based his releases.
Student-registration controversies have been a recurring problem since 1971, when the 26st Amendment lowered the voting age to 18 from 21, and despite a 1979 ruling by the United States Supreme Court that students have the right to register at their college address.
Virginia is not the only state with murky guidelines. South Carolina’s voter-registration site, for example, says students who want to register to vote at their college address must demonstrate “a present intention to remain in the community.”
“There’s no issue for snowbirds who live in Iowa but fly to Florida for the winter,” said Sujatha Jahagirdar, program director of the Student Public Interest Research Group’s New Voters Project. “One demographic group, like students, shouldn’t have to overcome a special hurdle to vote. We impose all the responsibilities of citizenship on students, and we have to provide them with the privileges of citizenship, too.”
Ms. Jahagirdar said Virginia’s warnings were profoundly misleading. “We have been registering young voters for 25 years,” she said. “We registered 500,000 young voters in 2004, the majority on college campuses, and we’ve never heard of a single one who lost health insurance, scholarship or tax status because of where they registered to vote.”
In Virginia, the county registrar first issued an alarming release on Aug. 25, and two days later a slightly toned-down version using language taken directly from the state Board of Elections’ Web site.
That site says students can determine their legal residence, but advises them to consider certain questions. “Are you claimed as a dependent on your parents’ income tax return?” the site asks. “If you are, then their address is probably your legal residence.”
The site also tells students to check whether their coverage under their parents’ health or automobile insurance, or their scholarship, will be affected by changing their residence.
Civil rights lawyers say these guidelines are problematic and could infringe on students’ rights.
“What the state Board of Elections has on its Web site, to me, sounds like it is discouraging students from registering at their school address,” said Jon Greenbaum, director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Indeed, the Montgomery County registrar, E. Randall Wertz, said several students had canceled their local registration over their worry about the possible consequences. Mr. Wertz said he had issued the release to try to dispel confusion and explain what he believed to be the consequences of choosing a college address as a primary residence.
“My understanding of state law has been that by declaring you’re voting here, you’re saying this is your primary residence, your domicile, and that while you can have many abodes or residences, you can only have one domicile,” Mr. Wertz said. “And if this is your primary residence, you have to register your vehicle here, charge your driver’s license to here and so on. That’s been the interpretation at state training sessions.”
Kevin Griffis, the Obama campaign’s Virginia spokesman, said the release appeared to be a good-faith effort to convey state guidelines, not a politically motivated effort to stop voting by students.
Mr. Wertz said the initial release had been written by an intern whom he asked to summarize the guidelines. Although the second release used the state’s precise language, he said, it still left room for confusion. In other counties, registrars have refused to accept dormitory addresses as residences. But so far, the state has not set clear standards.
“Different registrars around the state interpret it differently,” he said. “We’ve asked for more guidance from the state legislature, but they haven’t wanted to deal with it.”
Mr. Greenbaum’s Voting Rights Project has been involved in other student-registration cases. Last fall, in Statesboro, Ga., in a hotly contested city council race, there were challenges to the registration of about 1,000 Georgia Southern University students who had used dormitory addresses. “We threatened suit, but the issue went away when they figured out that the challenges weren’t going to affect the results of the election,” Mr. Greenbaum said.
In 2003, in Waller County, Tex., the district attorney wrote a column in a local newspaper threatening to prosecute students at Prairie View A&M, a historically black university, for illegal voting. The project sued, and the district attorney backed down.
In the 1970s, that same county required Prairie View students who wanted to register to fill out a questionnaire asking, among other things, whether they owned property in the county, had an automobile registered there or belonged to any church, club or organization unrelated to the college. A challenge to that practice led the Supreme Court to uphold students’ rights to vote at their college address.
CQ Politics Presidential Race Rating: No Clear Favorite
Electoral Votes: 20
Ohio’s close presidential contest in 2004 made it the last among the states to be decided, and Bush’s win by slightly more than 2 percentage points over Kerry gave him the 20 electoral votes that clinched his re-election.
The fact that no Republican has ever won the presidency without winning that state, more than any other, speaks to the importance — and the uncertainty — of winning Ohio. The last Democrat to win the presidency while losing Ohio was John F. Kennedy in 1960. Ohio is one of just four states that has backed the presidential election winner in each of the past 11 elections dating to 1964, in a bloc that also includes Kentucky, Missouri and Tennessee.
Ohio’s exalted place in presidential politics helps explain why prominent officeholders from that state routinely are mentioned as potential vice-presidential running mates. Rob Portman , who served as Bush’s trade envoy and then as his budget director is mentioned as a possible No. 2 for McCain in no small part because he is an Ohioan who formerly represented a Cincinnati-area House district. Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland was mentioned as a possible running mate choice for Obama until he removed his name from speculation.
Even with those developments, the longterm political track record suggests that the best Democrats can expect is for Ohio to maintain its traditional role as a bellwether state. That does not, of course, preclude an Obama win if he is running strongly in the national contest. But the outcome is likely to be close, whichever party ends up carrying the state.
Obama can expect a warm reception and plenty of votes from the state’s large urban centers of Cleveland and Columbus. Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, casts more votes than any other jurisdiction in the state, and in 2004 it backed Kerry by a 2-to-1 ratio and a margin of 227,000 votes (he fell short statewide by almost 119,000 votes). Columbus, the state capital and its most-populous city, dominates Franklin County, which Kerry won by 9 points.
Cincinnati, Ohio’s third most-populous city, leans Democratic, but the near-South quality of its environs, including its Hamilton County suburbs, typically create a Republican lean. Bush carried the county by 5 points.
Among mid-sized counties, Republicans run up huge margins in Butler, Warren and Clermont near Cincinnati and in Delaware County north of Columbus. The clincher for Bush was his strength in Ohio’s many conservative-leaning rural counties.
The presidential race in Ohio will dominate center stage in a year in which the state has no elections for governor or senator. But Ohio has drawn the close attention of House campaign strategists because the state is hosting competitive races in as many as seven districts, nearly all of which are being defended by Republicans.
Open seats tend to be more vulnerable than those in which incumbents are running, and the Republicans nationally are burdened with four-fifths of the open House seats. This problem is pronounced in Ohio, where three of 11 Republican House incumbents are retiring, and the Democrats appear to be at least even-money shots to win two of those seats.
In the district that takes in the western side of Columbus, some suburbs and rural areas to the west, Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy is seeking to succeed retiring eight-term Rep. Deborah Pryce after coming within 1 point of ousting the incumbent in 2006. Kilroy, a county commissioner in Columbus, got off to an early start in what she expected would be a rematch campaign against Pryce, who subsequently announced her retirement. Republicans are high on their own nominee, state Sen. Steve Stivers, an Iraq War veteran, though the Democrats have criticized his past work lobbying for the banking industry. CQ Politics rates this race as No Clear Favorite, our most competitive category.
The retirement of 18-term Republican Ralph Regula — a longtime Appropriations Committee member — in a northeastern Ohio district that includes Canton has spawned a highly competitive race there for the first time in many years. The contestants are state senators, John Boccieri for the Democrats and Kirk Schuring for the Republicans. Boccieri is an Iraq War veteran. Schuring represents Canton, which with about 81,000 residents is the district’s most populous city. CQ Politics also rates this race No Clear Favorite.
The Republicans will again be defending some seats in which the Democratic offensive is no less vigorous than in 2006. Seven-term Republican Rep. Steve Chabot will be opposed by Democratic state Rep. Steve Driehaus in a southwestern Ohio district that includes the bulk of Democratic-leaning Cincinnati but also some Republican-leaning suburbs north and west of the city. Chabot is more often than not a top target of the Democrats, but he’s been politically resilient and won with 52 percent in 2006.
The remainder of Cincinnati, along with more conservative and Republican-leaning turf east of the city, is represented by Republican Jean Schmidt . But her brief, three-year hold on the district since succeeding Portman in a 2005 special election has been shaky. She can’t be considered much more than a slight favorite against Democratic physician Vic Wulsin, who is waging a rematch campaign after coming within 1 percentage point of unseating Schmidt in 2006. We rate both Cincinnati-area races as Leans Republican.
There are some other races that are more mildly competitive. In the northeastern district that stretches from suburbs east of Cleveland to the Pennsylvania border, Democrat Bill O’Neill, a former state appellate judge, is opposing seven-term Rep. Steve LaTourette, whom the Democrats didn’t vigorously challenge in 2006. CQ Politics rates this race as Republican Favored.
The Republicans are even more likely to retain retiring Republican Rep. David L. Hobson ’s district, which takes in parts of south-central Ohio and a small part of Columbus. Republican state Sen. Steve Austria is opposed by Democratic lawyer Sharen Neuhardt.
Of the seven Democrats in Ohio’s U.S. House delegation, the only one who faces a remotely competitive race is freshman Zack Space , whose easy 2006 win in a culturally conservative east-central Ohio district was branded a fluke by Republicans — resulting, as it did in large part, from six-term Republican Rep. Bob Ney’s resignation and conviction on corruption charges related to his ties to influence peddler Jack Abramoff. But Space may be headed toward a second landslide win despite the district’s usual Republican orientation. The Republicans really struggled in candidate recruitment, and party nominee Fred Dailey, a former director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture, has struggled to raise the money needed to vigorously contest a vast district with multiple media markets. CQ Poitics rates this race as Democrat Favored.
CQ © 2007 All Rights Reserved | Congressional Quarterly Inc. 1255 22nd Street N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037 | 202-419-8500
Doors open at noon for the Baldwin-Wallace appearance. They open at 7:15 a.m. in Youngstown.
The events are open to the public but require tickets. Tickets for the Baldwin-Wallace College event are available at Obama's Parma headquarters, at 5580 Ridge Road.
Tickets for his Youngstown event are available at the Trumbull County Democratic headquarters, from 4 to 8:00 pm on Sunday and on Monday from 10:00 am - 9:00 pm. Tickets are also available at Obama's headquarters in Youngstown.
I was going to write this blog yesterday, but today it is a whole different story.
Yesterday there was a PPP poll released that had Obama ahead in Ohio by something like 8 points. This made me incredibly happy and have faith that Obama can win here even though Bush took the state narrowly in the past two elections (potentially crookedly).
Today, a Rasmunsen poll comes out with McCain ahead by 10 points. That is an 18 point difference between the two polls - way outside of the margin of error. I can't understand how two polls measuring voters from the same state can be so different.
So, the question is, which poll is closer to actuality? Pollster.com shows Obama ahead 3.5 points in an aggregate poll of polls. I would probably lean more heavily towards this number as the acutaul way that Ohioans feel right now. I expect that margin will grow in the months leading up to the election.
One good thing I see daily is the Obama team registering voters at Kent State and around town. Every percentage point that the voter rolls are increased is a point that goes to Obama in the general election. I also tend to think that the Obama numbers in Ohio could be low due to the high number of students who are cellphone only users and are under-polled.
Ohio is a state Obama can win with the correct allocation of resources. There is definitely a large contingent of conservative voters here (which is why Ohio is a perennial battleground state), but the enthusiasm for McCain the candidate is absent. At a recent event, I watched the Obama tent (directly across the street from the McCain tent) be busy all day long. The McCain tent would have maybe two people occaisionally stop. The Obama supporters were signing up new voters while the McCain camp sat idly by. There is no incentive for them to register voters because it will hurt them in the general election, so they don't (thats not the kind of party I want to belong to).
I am excited by the prospect that Ohio could be a blue state again. I am going to do my part before November 4 to make it happen.
Thanks for all the help KSU. Picture will be in the Stater on Monday.
Barack will be in Akron tomorrow. I'm going with a group of friends. Will be my first time seeing tha man himself.
Ohio votes March 4th. Vote then, vote early, or vote absentee (like J-Rock is doing). Just vote.
