QUOTE
Monday, January 10, 2005
News: Election 2004: The Election Reform Movement Blasts Off -- A Whirlwind Tour of Recent News
By ADVOCATE STAFF
Worried the election reform movement would stall post-certification challenge?
Think again.
The mainstream media's chagrin over the strident tone of the movement seems to have been mollified by the certainty -- at this point -- that President George W. Bush will be inaugurated for a second term on January 20th, 2005.
Indeed, with the specter of a constitutional crisis fading -- at least for the moment -- into the background of the national political debate, some heavy-hitters in the media are coming out of the woodwork in support of election reform.
And not election reform at some time in the distant future, but election reform here and now. Witness, for example, the following:
Part I: Editorials
On November 3rd, 2004, who would have thought it possible for a reporter from The Washington Post (in this case, William Raspberry) to write the following words?
"I would like to know if public officials and private citizens did engage in significant and concerted effort to steal the election in the event the wrong person seemed to be winning it.
And if so, I'd like to know who the miscreants were, what they did, and what heads are going to roll.
Because if all we get are a few hearings and empty promises, it's a safe bet it'll happen again."
The Indianapolis Star [Reprint of Raspberry Article]http://www.indystar.com/articles/0/208442-9410-021.html
The Advocate's whirlwind tour of election reform news continues with one of the country's most venerated progressive rags, The Nation.
In an editorial unabashedly titled, "An Election Reform Movement" -- that's right, The Nation is finally dubbing it a "Movement," capital "M" -- John Nichols writes,
"The objection [to the certification of Ohio's electors], and the Congressional debates that followed, were decried by the usual suspects -- White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who has the distinction of having never told the truth in his official capacity, dismissed evidence of disenfranchisement of minority voters as 'conspiracy theories' -- but they also drew enough thoughtful coverage and editorial comment from mainstream media to suggest that the fight was worth it.
A lot more Americans know about our flawed voting systems now. And a few more Democrats in Congress seem to have gotten the point that it is not appropriate to casually certify the results of an election that has been tainted by evidence of disenfranchisement, voter suppression and official misdeeds.
...
Congressional Democrats who failed to support the objection to the Ohio count -- as well as those moderate Republicans who would like to think of themselves as anything more than rubber stamps for a president who has never displayed respect for the Constitution -- need to ask themselves some questions: What is it about the phrase 'electoral justice' that don't they understand? Is there any level of minority disenfranchisement that they would take seriously? Do they really believe that conservative Republicans in Congress would go along with certification of election results from a state where there was significant evidence of disenfranchisement of a Republican leaning group, such as evangelical Christians?
They know the answers to those questions. And, if they are honest with themselves, those thinking members of Congress who failed to object to the certification of the Ohio results know that they let the American people down.
So the people will have to respond. I hope David Cobb, who has worked so hard on these issues, is right. I hope we are seeing the birth of a multi-partisan movement for election reform that will establish a universal set of standards for registering voters, casting ballots and counting ballots, and a deep commitment to assure that the system works for all Americans. Because, as Thursday's failure of responsibility by most members of Congress illustrated, we are still far short of electoral justice."
The Nation http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=2115
Earlier, The Boston Globe had weighed in on the issue with an editorial alliteratively entitled "Ballot Box Basics," which proffers to progressive activists this journalistic gem:
"Politics outweighed policy in yesterday's congressional debate on voting irregularities in the presidential election. But those who objected to the partisanship will serve themselves and the nation better if they stop scrapping and take the steps needed -- some of them obvious -- to fix the problems....[the challenge] was a worthwhile move because the November elections showed that much more needs to be done to give American voters confidence that the electoral process is sound.
...
If a loser takes the oath and serves as president, it doesn't improve things a great deal if the mistake occurs by accident rather than theft. And the fact that Bush was the clear victor this time should only underline the need for certainty. His victory was clear but narrow -- a shift of only 60,000 votes in Ohio would have left the nation in turmoil for the second straight election.
Congress should establish electoral reform as a top priority for this session to improve balloting in the 2006 midterm elections and assure that the next president will be chosen by the voters, not by mischance, fraud, or the Supreme Court.
The two Democrats who demanded congressional debate on the issue yesterday -- Senator Barbara Boxer of California and Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio -- deserve credit, not scorn, for advancing a cause fundamental to the union."
"Fundamental to the union."
The Advocate couldn't have put it better, and won't endeavor to do so.
The Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial...lot_box_basics/
Worried the indignation is quartered only by blue-states and progressive bastions?
Don't be.
Even The Toledo Blade, in an article by a reporter -- Jim Drew -- who openly opined that Representative Tubbs-Jones and Senator Boxer had risked joining the "tinfoil-hat brigade" with their certification challenge, nevertheless drummed up enough righteous anger (or mild-mannered pique, at least) to publish the following words:
"The irregularities on election day in Ohio are well-documented, and the debate over Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's handling of the election won't be over soon. Dems weren't the only ones who got glitched. The lines also were long in GOP enclaves in the Columbus area.
...
The Progressive Democrats of America have outlined what reforms are needed: a constitutional amendment confirming the right to vote; same-day registration for all Americans; creation of unified federal standards for national elections; and extended voting periods to allow all voters a meaningful opportunity to vote.
If the Democrats scrap the conspiracy theories and push for the reforms, they won't be marginalized. They'll be true democrats."
The Toledo Blade http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic...00308/-1/NEWS21
Even the moderate-to-conservative "Roll Call" got into the act, noting, in an article entitled "Vote As You Bank," that
"Every day, tens of millions of people use ATMs in utter confidence that their bank transactions will be accurately recorded. And as Bank of America brags in its television ads, it processes 10 billion checks annually with an error rate close to zero. This year, and the sooner the better, Congress ought to make America’s voting system work like that."
Amen.
Roll Call http://www.rollcall.com/pub/50_58/editorial/7669-1.html
Part II: News Stories
Could any election reform advocate ask for more than an Associated Press article entitled, "Debate Begins on How to Fix Nation's Voting System"?
No.
Wait, yes -- wouldn't it be great if the article were prominently featured in an least one Ohio newspaper? Maybe even
The Akron Beacon-Journal http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news...10593226.htm?1c
could run it?
Hmm.
But surely it would be too much to ask for some original Ohio-based reporting as well?
Can a movement only forty days old really expect
The Cleveland Plain-Dealer http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/...26668478510.xml
to run an article entitled, "Many Americans Refuse to Concede 'Stolen Election,'" in which the prominent Ohio paper features the cockle-warming "personal stories" of recount and election reform activists Ray Beckerman, Patricia Blochowiak, Harvey Wasserman, and Sheri Myers?
No: it appears that it would be and is not too much to ask.
At all.
And what about a registration-fraud investigation by
The Akron Beacon-Journal http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news...10605043.htm?1c
focusing on several police officers in Parma? Still think the Ohio general election is no longer in the news?
How about an article in The Toledo Blade entitled, "Purging of Rolls, Confusion Angers Voters; 41% of November 2nd Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County"?
The Toledo Blade http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic...090334/0/NEWS21
What It All Means
The Advocate submits that, all in all, it's almost unthinkable to imagine an Ohio Republican having been disenfranchised on November 2nd, 2004.
Not because thousands of them weren't disenfranchised on Election Day -- undoubtedly, they were -- but because the national Republican Party's concern over election reform is so slight The Advocate finds it hard to believe any citizen concerned over their own disenfranchisement would call themselves a Republican anymore.
Indeed, U.S. Senators and Representatives from the Republican Party stood up in the well of Congress on January 6th, 2004 and expressed their scorn, derision, and outright contempt for the notion that Ohio's 2004 general election was, at its core, a general disaster. What say, then, the thousands of Ohio Republicans whose votes were trashed on November 2nd? What confidence could they possibly have that the elected representatives of their chosen party take their anguish and frustration seriously?
None. None whatsoever.
And this fact has been brought most startlingly to light by the most unlikely of sources: Ohio newspapers, many of which are cited above. The Advocate uses the term "unlikely" here to highlight the fact that it was these same newspapers whose editorial pages were thrust about the halls of Congress on January 6th -- as national Republicans' "proof" that there were no substantial irregularities in Ohio on Election Day.
Tell that to Ralph and Barbara George, a couple with a son in the military who have lived in the same house in East Toledo for more than four decades. Their registrations were among the more than 30,000 purged by Lucas County, Ohio in the days preceding the general election. Their crime? Not having voted in the 2000 and 1996 presidential elections.
Were they perhaps uninterested in the 1996 election -- predicted to be a landslide for Clinton -- and simply indifferent to Gore and Bush in 2000? Perhaps, but that lack of interest and indifference cost them dearly on Election Day. Oddly, the couple had been validly registered in Ohio up until ninety days before the election, when they, along with tens of thousands of other Lucas County residents, were "purged" -- which The Advocate submits is a Republican term for "indiscriminately eliminating -- statistically -- far more Democrats than Republicans from county voting rolls, under the guise of cutting the dead, felons, and lapsed voters from the registration books."
In Florida, the justification used for "over-purging" is that it is worth it to wrongfully disenfranchise 10,000 American citizens if several hundred erroneously-registered voters can be rightfully removed from the voting rolls.
In Ohio, Lucas County's August purge not only removed tens of thousand from the voter rolls, but hundreds who had been validly registered up to that point. [The Advocate wonders: why wait so long to purge? Why not give voters the two years between federal elections to remedy their registration status -- rather than a matter of only twelve to sixteen weeks?].
This, then, is the Republican vision of "election reform" -- for the sake of avoiding one or two dead people or felons on the voting rolls, strip thousands of validly registered voters of their right to vote. Indeed, the sharp whine heard from Congressional Republicans on January 6th on occasion coalesced into a semi-coherent anecdotal babble about a single dead person being registered to vote -- mind you, registered only, without proof the dead person ever "voted" -- in far-flung Ohio counties. Yet the Republican caucus couldn't muster any concern whatsoever for the disenfranchisement of thousands upon thousands of Ohio voters.
Could it be because the more voters you disenfranchise, the more Democrats you disenfranchise? This was certainly proven true in Florida in 2000 and Ohio this year, where the poor (being more geographically transient) and minorities (because of commonalities of surname) were disproportionately disenfranchised by Republican officials -- and were, of course, disproportionately Democratic-leaning as well.
Perhaps the Republicans could more articulately explain their vision of election reform to the staff of The Toledo Blade, who report that "The problems with provisional voting in Lucas County point to a significant weakness in a process designed to accommodate those voters who tend to be least familiar with their local voting system. Democrats filed lawsuits in the days leading up to the election to change the way Ohio would treat its provisional ballots, but rulings from those lawsuits left the state's procedures largely unchanged....a high percentage of the rejected votes could have been salvaged had the voters been a little more knowledgeable about voting procedures or had they received a little help from poll workers."
Perhaps J. Kenneth Blackwell can explain his exemplary support for voter enfranchisement to Brandi Stenson, who nearly lost the opportunity to vote in the 2004 election because -- as she told The Blade -- "we were in the right building. We were in the wrong lines. I just feel like [the poll workers] didn't know what they were doing. They wanted us to hurry up, because I was asking questions, my mom was asking questions. They were trying to rush us out."
From Blackwell (as reported by The Blade): "Directives to county elections officials from Mr. Blackwell decreed that poll workers are responsible for helping voters determine if they are voting in the correct precinct. 'Before permitting an individual to cast a provisional ballot, the poll worker must determine the address of the individual [and] determine if the address of the individual is located within the precinct,' states a Blackwell directive to county election boards. 'If the address is not located within the precinct, the poll worker shall tell the voter both: (A) The precinct in which the voter's residence is located; and (
The location of the polling place for that precinct. If necessary, the poll worker shall contact the board of elections to determine this information.'"
Of course, thousands of voters waited in the wrong lines on Election Day -- for ten hours or more -- before Blackwell's hyper-technical, wholly unnecessary directive sent them marching to different polling places and, of course, a second hours-long stay at the end of an interminable line of voters.
The Advocate submits there are only two lines now when it comes to election reform: and you're either in the right line or you're not.
Blackwell is on the wrong side of history, and will be on the losing side of this war. So, too, the Republicans, unless they make good on their supposed commitment to American values, and American morality, and support meaningful and timely election reform.
Now.
News: Election 2004: The Election Reform Movement Blasts Off -- A Whirlwind Tour of Recent News
By ADVOCATE STAFF
Worried the election reform movement would stall post-certification challenge?
Think again.
The mainstream media's chagrin over the strident tone of the movement seems to have been mollified by the certainty -- at this point -- that President George W. Bush will be inaugurated for a second term on January 20th, 2005.
Indeed, with the specter of a constitutional crisis fading -- at least for the moment -- into the background of the national political debate, some heavy-hitters in the media are coming out of the woodwork in support of election reform.
And not election reform at some time in the distant future, but election reform here and now. Witness, for example, the following:
Part I: Editorials
On November 3rd, 2004, who would have thought it possible for a reporter from The Washington Post (in this case, William Raspberry) to write the following words?
"I would like to know if public officials and private citizens did engage in significant and concerted effort to steal the election in the event the wrong person seemed to be winning it.
And if so, I'd like to know who the miscreants were, what they did, and what heads are going to roll.
Because if all we get are a few hearings and empty promises, it's a safe bet it'll happen again."
The Indianapolis Star [Reprint of Raspberry Article]http://www.indystar.com/articles/0/208442-9410-021.html
The Advocate's whirlwind tour of election reform news continues with one of the country's most venerated progressive rags, The Nation.
In an editorial unabashedly titled, "An Election Reform Movement" -- that's right, The Nation is finally dubbing it a "Movement," capital "M" -- John Nichols writes,
"The objection [to the certification of Ohio's electors], and the Congressional debates that followed, were decried by the usual suspects -- White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who has the distinction of having never told the truth in his official capacity, dismissed evidence of disenfranchisement of minority voters as 'conspiracy theories' -- but they also drew enough thoughtful coverage and editorial comment from mainstream media to suggest that the fight was worth it.
A lot more Americans know about our flawed voting systems now. And a few more Democrats in Congress seem to have gotten the point that it is not appropriate to casually certify the results of an election that has been tainted by evidence of disenfranchisement, voter suppression and official misdeeds.
...
Congressional Democrats who failed to support the objection to the Ohio count -- as well as those moderate Republicans who would like to think of themselves as anything more than rubber stamps for a president who has never displayed respect for the Constitution -- need to ask themselves some questions: What is it about the phrase 'electoral justice' that don't they understand? Is there any level of minority disenfranchisement that they would take seriously? Do they really believe that conservative Republicans in Congress would go along with certification of election results from a state where there was significant evidence of disenfranchisement of a Republican leaning group, such as evangelical Christians?
They know the answers to those questions. And, if they are honest with themselves, those thinking members of Congress who failed to object to the certification of the Ohio results know that they let the American people down.
So the people will have to respond. I hope David Cobb, who has worked so hard on these issues, is right. I hope we are seeing the birth of a multi-partisan movement for election reform that will establish a universal set of standards for registering voters, casting ballots and counting ballots, and a deep commitment to assure that the system works for all Americans. Because, as Thursday's failure of responsibility by most members of Congress illustrated, we are still far short of electoral justice."
The Nation http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=2115
Earlier, The Boston Globe had weighed in on the issue with an editorial alliteratively entitled "Ballot Box Basics," which proffers to progressive activists this journalistic gem:
"Politics outweighed policy in yesterday's congressional debate on voting irregularities in the presidential election. But those who objected to the partisanship will serve themselves and the nation better if they stop scrapping and take the steps needed -- some of them obvious -- to fix the problems....[the challenge] was a worthwhile move because the November elections showed that much more needs to be done to give American voters confidence that the electoral process is sound.
...
If a loser takes the oath and serves as president, it doesn't improve things a great deal if the mistake occurs by accident rather than theft. And the fact that Bush was the clear victor this time should only underline the need for certainty. His victory was clear but narrow -- a shift of only 60,000 votes in Ohio would have left the nation in turmoil for the second straight election.
Congress should establish electoral reform as a top priority for this session to improve balloting in the 2006 midterm elections and assure that the next president will be chosen by the voters, not by mischance, fraud, or the Supreme Court.
The two Democrats who demanded congressional debate on the issue yesterday -- Senator Barbara Boxer of California and Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio -- deserve credit, not scorn, for advancing a cause fundamental to the union."
"Fundamental to the union."
The Advocate couldn't have put it better, and won't endeavor to do so.
The Boston Globe http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial...lot_box_basics/
Worried the indignation is quartered only by blue-states and progressive bastions?
Don't be.
Even The Toledo Blade, in an article by a reporter -- Jim Drew -- who openly opined that Representative Tubbs-Jones and Senator Boxer had risked joining the "tinfoil-hat brigade" with their certification challenge, nevertheless drummed up enough righteous anger (or mild-mannered pique, at least) to publish the following words:
"The irregularities on election day in Ohio are well-documented, and the debate over Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell's handling of the election won't be over soon. Dems weren't the only ones who got glitched. The lines also were long in GOP enclaves in the Columbus area.
...
The Progressive Democrats of America have outlined what reforms are needed: a constitutional amendment confirming the right to vote; same-day registration for all Americans; creation of unified federal standards for national elections; and extended voting periods to allow all voters a meaningful opportunity to vote.
If the Democrats scrap the conspiracy theories and push for the reforms, they won't be marginalized. They'll be true democrats."
The Toledo Blade http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic...00308/-1/NEWS21
Even the moderate-to-conservative "Roll Call" got into the act, noting, in an article entitled "Vote As You Bank," that
"Every day, tens of millions of people use ATMs in utter confidence that their bank transactions will be accurately recorded. And as Bank of America brags in its television ads, it processes 10 billion checks annually with an error rate close to zero. This year, and the sooner the better, Congress ought to make America’s voting system work like that."
Amen.
Roll Call http://www.rollcall.com/pub/50_58/editorial/7669-1.html
Part II: News Stories
Could any election reform advocate ask for more than an Associated Press article entitled, "Debate Begins on How to Fix Nation's Voting System"?
No.
Wait, yes -- wouldn't it be great if the article were prominently featured in an least one Ohio newspaper? Maybe even
The Akron Beacon-Journal http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news...10593226.htm?1c
could run it?
Hmm.
But surely it would be too much to ask for some original Ohio-based reporting as well?
Can a movement only forty days old really expect
The Cleveland Plain-Dealer http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/...26668478510.xml
to run an article entitled, "Many Americans Refuse to Concede 'Stolen Election,'" in which the prominent Ohio paper features the cockle-warming "personal stories" of recount and election reform activists Ray Beckerman, Patricia Blochowiak, Harvey Wasserman, and Sheri Myers?
No: it appears that it would be and is not too much to ask.
At all.
And what about a registration-fraud investigation by
The Akron Beacon-Journal http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaconjournal/news...10605043.htm?1c
focusing on several police officers in Parma? Still think the Ohio general election is no longer in the news?
How about an article in The Toledo Blade entitled, "Purging of Rolls, Confusion Angers Voters; 41% of November 2nd Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County"?
The Toledo Blade http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic...090334/0/NEWS21
What It All Means
The Advocate submits that, all in all, it's almost unthinkable to imagine an Ohio Republican having been disenfranchised on November 2nd, 2004.
Not because thousands of them weren't disenfranchised on Election Day -- undoubtedly, they were -- but because the national Republican Party's concern over election reform is so slight The Advocate finds it hard to believe any citizen concerned over their own disenfranchisement would call themselves a Republican anymore.
Indeed, U.S. Senators and Representatives from the Republican Party stood up in the well of Congress on January 6th, 2004 and expressed their scorn, derision, and outright contempt for the notion that Ohio's 2004 general election was, at its core, a general disaster. What say, then, the thousands of Ohio Republicans whose votes were trashed on November 2nd? What confidence could they possibly have that the elected representatives of their chosen party take their anguish and frustration seriously?
None. None whatsoever.
And this fact has been brought most startlingly to light by the most unlikely of sources: Ohio newspapers, many of which are cited above. The Advocate uses the term "unlikely" here to highlight the fact that it was these same newspapers whose editorial pages were thrust about the halls of Congress on January 6th -- as national Republicans' "proof" that there were no substantial irregularities in Ohio on Election Day.
Tell that to Ralph and Barbara George, a couple with a son in the military who have lived in the same house in East Toledo for more than four decades. Their registrations were among the more than 30,000 purged by Lucas County, Ohio in the days preceding the general election. Their crime? Not having voted in the 2000 and 1996 presidential elections.
Were they perhaps uninterested in the 1996 election -- predicted to be a landslide for Clinton -- and simply indifferent to Gore and Bush in 2000? Perhaps, but that lack of interest and indifference cost them dearly on Election Day. Oddly, the couple had been validly registered in Ohio up until ninety days before the election, when they, along with tens of thousands of other Lucas County residents, were "purged" -- which The Advocate submits is a Republican term for "indiscriminately eliminating -- statistically -- far more Democrats than Republicans from county voting rolls, under the guise of cutting the dead, felons, and lapsed voters from the registration books."
In Florida, the justification used for "over-purging" is that it is worth it to wrongfully disenfranchise 10,000 American citizens if several hundred erroneously-registered voters can be rightfully removed from the voting rolls.
In Ohio, Lucas County's August purge not only removed tens of thousand from the voter rolls, but hundreds who had been validly registered up to that point. [The Advocate wonders: why wait so long to purge? Why not give voters the two years between federal elections to remedy their registration status -- rather than a matter of only twelve to sixteen weeks?].
This, then, is the Republican vision of "election reform" -- for the sake of avoiding one or two dead people or felons on the voting rolls, strip thousands of validly registered voters of their right to vote. Indeed, the sharp whine heard from Congressional Republicans on January 6th on occasion coalesced into a semi-coherent anecdotal babble about a single dead person being registered to vote -- mind you, registered only, without proof the dead person ever "voted" -- in far-flung Ohio counties. Yet the Republican caucus couldn't muster any concern whatsoever for the disenfranchisement of thousands upon thousands of Ohio voters.
Could it be because the more voters you disenfranchise, the more Democrats you disenfranchise? This was certainly proven true in Florida in 2000 and Ohio this year, where the poor (being more geographically transient) and minorities (because of commonalities of surname) were disproportionately disenfranchised by Republican officials -- and were, of course, disproportionately Democratic-leaning as well.
Perhaps the Republicans could more articulately explain their vision of election reform to the staff of The Toledo Blade, who report that "The problems with provisional voting in Lucas County point to a significant weakness in a process designed to accommodate those voters who tend to be least familiar with their local voting system. Democrats filed lawsuits in the days leading up to the election to change the way Ohio would treat its provisional ballots, but rulings from those lawsuits left the state's procedures largely unchanged....a high percentage of the rejected votes could have been salvaged had the voters been a little more knowledgeable about voting procedures or had they received a little help from poll workers."
Perhaps J. Kenneth Blackwell can explain his exemplary support for voter enfranchisement to Brandi Stenson, who nearly lost the opportunity to vote in the 2004 election because -- as she told The Blade -- "we were in the right building. We were in the wrong lines. I just feel like [the poll workers] didn't know what they were doing. They wanted us to hurry up, because I was asking questions, my mom was asking questions. They were trying to rush us out."
From Blackwell (as reported by The Blade): "Directives to county elections officials from Mr. Blackwell decreed that poll workers are responsible for helping voters determine if they are voting in the correct precinct. 'Before permitting an individual to cast a provisional ballot, the poll worker must determine the address of the individual [and] determine if the address of the individual is located within the precinct,' states a Blackwell directive to county election boards. 'If the address is not located within the precinct, the poll worker shall tell the voter both: (A) The precinct in which the voter's residence is located; and (
The location of the polling place for that precinct. If necessary, the poll worker shall contact the board of elections to determine this information.'"Of course, thousands of voters waited in the wrong lines on Election Day -- for ten hours or more -- before Blackwell's hyper-technical, wholly unnecessary directive sent them marching to different polling places and, of course, a second hours-long stay at the end of an interminable line of voters.
The Advocate submits there are only two lines now when it comes to election reform: and you're either in the right line or you're not.
Blackwell is on the wrong side of history, and will be on the losing side of this war. So, too, the Republicans, unless they make good on their supposed commitment to American values, and American morality, and support meaningful and timely election reform.
Now.