Ohio secretary of state may end Jim Crow voting disparity with uniform early-voting-hours policy

Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted may be cracking under pressure from critics over the state's disparate early voting rules that favor Republican counties and hamstring voters in Democratic counties. Husted says he is checking with the state attorney general to see if he can impose a uniform statewide policy on early voting, power that he thinks he has. As reported last week, Husted had decided he would allow each of Ohio's 88 counties to make their own rules about how to handle early voting hours.

The problem with that? Republicans on county election boards were supporting extra early voting hours on evenings and weekends in Republican-dominated counties but they were opposing them in counties where Democrats hold sway.

Husted's "local control" argument is a poorly constructed façade designed to cover raw partisanship.

Each board comprises two Democrats and two Republicans. Democrats, who for the past 50 years have always favored ensuring everybody who wants to vote has every chance to do so, approved early voting hours in all the counties where the issue has been brought up. Republicans on those boards have voted for more early hours in Republican counties but against more hours in Democratic counties. With the vote at 2-2, it has been up to Husted to break the tie. He has been doing so in favor of the boards' Republicans.

What that's meant is that four urban counties with large minority, mostly African American, populations that gave Barack Obama a 490,000-voter margin over John McCain in 2008 will have no early voting hours for evenings and weekends. Whiter, suburban, Republican counties with an 87,000-vote margin for McCain will have lots of evening and weekend hours available.

Results? Well, duh.

As The New York Times Editorial Board described it, this is "sleazy politics" and "overt discrimination":

This is just the latest alarming example of how Republicans across the country are trying to manipulate the electoral system by blocking the voting rights of their opponents. These actions have a disproportionate effect on blacks, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities who struggled for so long to participate in American democracy.

If this 21st Century-style Jim Crow tactic weren't so serious, one could laugh off remarks like those of Alex Triantafilou, chairman of the Hamilton County Republican Party. He says this is all a Democratic attempt to “demonize Republicans as trying to suppress the vote when the opposite is true. The Democrats are playing politics with the voting rights issue, but we’re not taking the bait."

Husted has played the key role in ensuring that the vote in heavily Democratic counties is suppressed. He could easily have kept things square and fair by breaking the tie in favor of more hours, meaning more voting. He chose instead to follow the partisan path on an issue that should never be partisan.

He's got a chance to redeem himself now by imposing a uniform policy leaning toward more hours statewide. But he doesn't have to await the attorney general's ruling to start making things right. He can simply reverse his previous tie-breakers in the Democratic counties where his decision has meant early voting hours are curtailed. No apology needed. Just a simple, "I've changed my mind in favor of the broadest participation at the polls." That's how every secretary of state should behave.

On the other hand, Husted might choose to get rid of early voting hours altogether in his uniform policy. That move would also hurt Democrats most because they have the most difficulty getting to the polls.