Ohio Voters Revolt

Americans are generally pretty forgiving, willing to live and let live unless somebody is really screwing them over. But when public frustration reaches a boiling point, look out. As old King George learned a long time ago, the colonists will revolt if you push them too far.

Voter frustration in Ohio may now be reaching a tipping point after citizens have seen their elected officials sell out the state to shylocks and shysters and rig election districts to favor their own re-election .

The first insult came in last November's elections, when thousands of Ohio voters had to wait in line for hours to cast ballots. While there's scant evidence that the flawed administration of Ohio's elections actually changed the outcome of the presidential race, there is no doubt that the long lines and discredited provisional ballots left many voters feeling as if the state was going out of its way to discourage their voting. Recent Ohio elections have seen ballot shortages, closed polling places, and double counted ballots. That the President of Diebold, the voting machine manufacturer based in Ohio, had promised to deliver the state for President Bush only deepened voter skepticism.

The second insult came last December when a lame duck legislature used a special session to ram through changes in campaign finance law that quadrupled the amounts that wealthy donors could contribute to candidate campaigns. The law was passed by incumbent legislators who had just outspent their challengers by a more than seven-to-one margin in the 2004 elections. I guess that wasn't enough of an advantage for them.

The truth is, most incumbents don't even need the huge financial advantage that they have over anyone who dares to unseat them. Politicians see to it that they'll have an easy time come re-election by rigging the process by which legislative and congressional districts are drawn. Through the use of sophisticated computer mapping software, it is now possible for legislators to draw districts that are virtually assured of electing either a Democrat or a Republican.

The final straw for Ohio voters may have come this summer, after a series of political scandals shined a spotlight on a corrupt culture in Columbus. Ohio politicians handed over trust funds for injured workers to a consummate campaign contributor who "invested" the money in gold coins and collectibles. Millions were lost in foolish deals and still other millions are unaccounted for and probably stolen.

By a ratio of three-to-one, Ohio voters now say that the state is heading in the wrong direction. People are fed up, but instead of despair they have decided to do something about it. This summer, a citizens coalition called Reform Ohio Now gathered signatures from more than a half-million Ohio citizens to place three sweeping election reform measures on this November's ballot. In the course of ten short weeks, 2,500 people signed up over the Internet to volunteer in this effort.

The measures would dramatically curtail politicians' ability to circumvent democracy with massive campaign warchests and designer districts. One initiative would lower individual campaign contribution limits by 90% for legislative races while banning corporate contributions. A second would completely remove politicians from the process of drawing legislative and congressional districts and hand the process over to an independent commission. The final ballot question would create a bipartisan panel to oversee election administration.

The result: politicians would be more accountable to the voters they purport to represent. It's enough to make them downright uncomfortable.

Given Ohio's battleground status in the last presidential election, a successful reform effort there could draw national attention. Incumbents in other states will be watching nervously over their shoulders to see if the citizen uprising could spread to their states.

The Republican majority that controls the Ohio statehouse has vowed to raise $10 million to defeat this voter revolt. While big money normally confers a huge advantage in ballot initiative campaigns. In Ohio, where big money is a huge part of the problem, spending $10 million may only serve to throw gas on the fire of the voters' discontent.