"Democracy Dies in the Dark"
Jon Husted is an unbelievable embarrassment
by CLEVELAND FROWNS on NOVEMBER 9, 2012
To Ohio, to the United States and to humanity. If it wasn’t bad enough that the Republican Party has been so successful in replacing the vote with the dollar as the fundamental unit of democracy in this country, Ohio’s Secretary of State Jon Husted has abandoned all pretenses in his efforts to leverage his elected office to just do away with the whole voting thing altogether. This account in The Atlantic of recent legal proceedings surrounding Husted’s last ditch attempt to disenfranchise Ohio voters is just unreal.
In sum, at 7PM last Friday, Husted issued a directive to Ohio election workers that was in direct violation of a consent decree regarding the standards for provisional ballots that had been agreed by all parties and affirmed by U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley just two days earlier. Husted’s order purported to require election workers to invalidate a category of ballots that the Court had already declared to be valid per the decree, and it did so without any discernible legal justification. At a Wednesday hearing on the validity of this directive, one especially pointed exchange between Judge Marbley and Arnold Epstein, the state attorney representing Husted, went as follows:
THE COURT: Mr. Epstein.
Mr. Epstein, would you agree that voting is the linchpin of our democracy?
MR. EPSTEIN: Yes, Your Honor.
THE COURT: I do too. What concerned me about the 2012-54 directive is that it was filed on a Friday night at 7 p.m. The first thought that came to mind was democracy dies in the dark. So, when you do things like that that seeks to avoid transparency, it appears, then that gives me great pause but even greater concern.
...
http://www.clevelandfrowns.com/2012/11/jon-husted-is-an-unbelievable-embarrassment/
Best quote to come from this elect: "The first thought that came to mind was democracy dies in the dark. So, when you do things like that that seeks to avoid transparency, it appears, then that gives me great pause but even greater concern."
