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" Telling Ohio&amp;#039;s Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted not to finagle around with the franchise is like telling a dog not to lick his balls. The dog will do it because he can, and Husted continues to do it, come hell, high water, or judicial dope-slapping, because he can. But yesterday Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted released a new voting schedule that deletes both pre-Election Day Sundays from the early voting formula. Under the new rules, people can vote in the four weeks before Election Day, Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and on the final two Saturdays before Election Day. Husted tried this trick two years ago, and a federal court forced him to reinstate Sunday voting. Now, though, Husted&amp;#039;s has found himself with some running room thanks to the conjuring power of the word, &amp;quot;bipartisan.&amp;quot; This time around, Husted took his policy cue from the Ohio Association of Election Officials, a bipartisan group of county election supervisors. In 2012, one of those officials, Doug Priesse, who headed the Franklin County Republican Party at the time, said he opposed early voting because it helped black voters access their ballots. The Ohio legislature adopted in-person absentee voting in 2005 in response to Ohio&amp;#039;s seven-hour lines during the 2004 presidential election-the longest in the country. Since its implementation, an increasing number of Ohio voters have taken advantage of early voting each year. In 2012, 600,000 Ohioans-20 percent of the electorate-voted early, and in Cuyahoga County, 41 percent of voters voted early. Many of those voters were voters of color, as Cuyahoga County is nearly 30 percent African-American and nearly five percent Latino. &amp;quot;I have watched as numerous election laws have passed the General Assembly and yet the bipartisan plan I have advocated for has neither been introduced nor adopted,&amp;quot; said Husted about his new voting directions. &amp;quot;We have a bipartisan solution in this proposal and it is time to implement it.&amp;quot; The word bipartisan used to be an anodyne political adjective that stood. among other things, a functioning democracy, and not one that is paralyzed at the local and national levels by one of its two political parties that has determined that its primary philosophy will be rule or ruin. Now, at best, it&amp;#039;s a cheap alibi and, at worst, it represents the futile hope of people in this business who resolutely refuse to look reality in the eye. In Husted&amp;#039;s case, however, it&amp;#039;s a lock-pick. Squashing early voting is not the only finagling going on. As for Ohio, the early voting cuts come on top of another controversial decision to move one of the state&amp;#039;s most heavily used early voting locations from downtown Cincinnati to a neighborhood that voting rights advocates say is far less accessible for those of low-income and the disabled.  This is not merely wrong. It is craven. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a27548/ohio-early-voting-022614/>