Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call from Behind the Lines by David Pepper

Author:David Pepper [Pepper, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: St. Helena Press
Published: 2021-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

2021: The Culmination

REMEMBER HOW VOTING rights groups found all those purging mistakes in Ohio in 2019?

Their work represented the best of American democracy. Volunteers heroically poring over the list of voters to be purged, calling thousands of their fellow Ohioans to alert them that they were on the list and needed to take action. Along the way, uncovering the truth . . . that 40,000 were listed in error. If it weren’t for these groups’ actions, so many more voters would’ve been purged going into the 2020 election, many due to no fault of their own. And Ohio would never have known about how broken its purging process is.

And recall how the legislature refused to do anything about this?

Well, in 2021, that changed.

They finally acted.

They passed a law forbidding the secretary of state from collaborating with or expending any resources working with groups like these to register voters or undertake other election-related activities.531 So as Ohio keeps purging voters through an error-strewn process, never again, the legislature commanded, should groups be able to play their 2019 role of working with the secretary of state’s office to uncover those errors or re-register purged voters.

That law came at the same time as the bill to ban more drop boxes was moving forward. That same bill would also eliminate the final Monday of early vote (which 60,000 voters used in 2020). And would add ID requirements for vote by mail. And reduce the time to request a vote-by-mail ballot. Months later, a new bill was introduced to eliminate all drop boxes, while also eliminating the entire early vote process that came after the disastrous 2004 election. And all of these laws are coming on the heels of an election that Ohio Republicans like Frank LaRose have touted as having been clean and fraud-free. So clearly, combating fraud is not the motivation behind these new changes.

Meanwhile, on the same day the legislature voted to hamstring those groups, a different kind of elections bill sailed through. More so than the others, it represented a fundamental breach of another core principle of American governance. Yet amid the flurry, it got far less attention.

Here’s the background:

The greatest Democratic overperformance in the 2020 election occurred in Ohio, when appellate Judge Jennifer Brunner toppled a sitting Ohio Supreme Court Justice by ten points. In Ohio, judicial races don’t have a party ID listed on the ballot. But the parties do endorse candidates. Brunner was the Democratic-endorsed candidate; the opponent she toppled, the Republican-endorsed candidate. An eighteen-point swing (Donald Trump won Ohio by eight points) is a decisive win, especially in an election when only five Democratic candidates in the entire nation picked up statewide seats in states Trump won.

But the win wasn’t a fluke. It was the third win in four races for the Democratic-endorsed candidate for the Ohio Supreme Court, taking the Court from 7-0 to 4-3 in only two years. Along the way, Democratic-endorsed judicial candidates also unseated numerous incumbents at the appellate level across the state, securing a majority of Ohio’s appellate judicial seats for the first time in memory.

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