Confusion in Ohio

10/30/2004

At a rally in Washington a couple of Sundays ago called the Million Worker March, comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory joked, "We won the Voting Rights Act forty years ago, but it didn't say they have to count that vote. That's gonna have to be another bill and another march." In the run-up to the election, Ohio is putting its own special exclamation point on that statement.

Since the beginning of the year voter registration in the state has swelled by about 700,000 souls, to a record 7.8 million voters. It's estimated that about 60 percent of those new voters registered as Democrats. Meanwhile, like sportscasters filling the dead air between plays, pundits have been intoning for months that "No Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio." All of which lays the table for what Republican operatives nationally have been quite frank to admit is an effort to suppress the vote, and--surprise, surprise--such plans especially target African-Americans.

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