Turdblossom was freaking out. A full stuttering tantrum-fit on Fox TV.
You know Turdblossom. That’s the name George W. Bush gave his Senior Counselor, Karl Rove. Turdblossom Rove is that pudgy guy you see all the time on Fox, with the little soft hands and wet lips. He was also known as “Bush’s Brain.”
It was close to midnight at the end of Election Day 2012, and Fox News had just called Ohio—the swing state of swing states—for Obama. Obama, said Fox, had been re-elected President.
And Rove was going berserk, refusing to accept Obama’s Ohio win. The Fox hosts, though deep Republican red, could not understand why Turdblossom would not just give up.
But Rove knew what they didn’t: that Obama’s re-election could be reversed by one last, quite brilliant, ballot game.
Here’s the thing about Ohio. A third of the vote in Ohio is cast early. That’s won overwhelmingly by the Democrats. It’s counted first and then you count the Election Day.
What was he babbling about? This: About 70% of Black voters in Ohio had cast their ballots on early voting days. But why would that matter? A ballot’s a ballot, right?
Not in Ohio, it ain’t.
Rove knew that these hundreds of thousands of Black early voters were not given regular ballots. Instead, they were all given ballots that could be disqualified. For the first time in Ohio history, just days before the election, the Republican Secretary of State had secretly ordered a ballot switch for early—i.e., Black—voters.
But our chief investigator, Leni Badpenny, had already gotten the tip, four days earlier. The tip-off was important enough for her to slog across Manhattan during a power black-out to find a signal to relay the info to me. (Our Long Island office had been washed away by Storm Sandy and our files in New York were floating in two feet of water.)
An Ohio voter had sent her a message that early voters were not allowed to vote on regular ballots or on voting machines. Instead, they were handed an absentee mail-in ballot.
This was a Big Deal. But to make sure this was not a BS tip, I immediately called Professor Fitrakis, dean of voting rights experts in Ohio. He said, “That would be really, really bad” if they handed out absentee ballots. But, the attorney assured me, this was impossible, “the state can’t do that.”
But I’m suspicious by trade and training. So, despite the reassurance that this could not happen, I drove through the night to Dayton, Ohio, where, in the morning, I found the Freedom Faith Baptist Church. The church, a tiny white clapboard structure on a street of foreclosed homes, had advertised it was hosting a “Souls to the Polls” convoy. Most Ohio African-Americans vote on the Sunday before Election Day, after attending church, because they can’t get off work, or they need a ride in a church van to get to the voting station.
“Souls to the Polls” began after the 2004 election when John Kerry lost the presidency by a few votes in Ohio. Kerry would have been president except that Black voters, some waiting 7 or 8 hours in the rain, found polling station doors closed in their faces at the 7:30 p.m. cut-off. It was safer to vote on Sunday after church.
At Freedom Faith Baptist, Souls to the Polls organizer Terra Williams, who didn’t know me from Adam, invited me in for gospel and Sunday supper: chicken, square-cut blocks of macaroni and cheese, collard greens.
Pastor Frederick Hayes, with an electric guitar, was rocking the church.
This little light of mine . . . I’m gonna let it SHINE!
After the chicken, we loaded into the church van and headed to the lone early voting station in Dayton, and waited.
And waited.
Five hours. The line of more than a thousand voters snaked through the parking lot, all waiting in the skin-numbing Ohio November cold.
Check out these two photos: Here I am walking the Dayton line. Now, take a look at the second photo. In it, I am checking out the voting line in a white suburb of Toledo, Ohio. Or, to be accurate, there was no line. Zero wait. And to warm the Caucasian voters after their run from SUV to doorway, poll workers put out cookies and coffee.
Then weird turned weirder.
When the Souls at the Polls got to the end of the five-hour line, inside the county clerk’s office, they found the voting machines covered with what looked like bedsheets. Instead of access to the voting machines, instead of a ballot, each voter was handed a form to request an absentee ballot. Why? They weren’t absent, they were right in the polling station, but blocked from using voting machines.
The man in charge, the County Clerk, was miserable. He told me that the Secretary of State’s last-minute edict to hand out absentee ballots was adding hours to the wait for early voters. The Secretary of State was Republican Jon Husted, as in Husted v. APRI, purge pro.
Husted knew that impossibly long lines in Black precincts had been crucial to Bush’s victory in 2004. So, Husted worked hard to make them longer. He cut early voting hours, and only a Court order stopped him from shutting down Souls to the Polls Day altogether.
Dayton was ugly, but in Cleveland, Rev. Jesse Jackson was reporting a wait of seven hours.
This was the result of Husted’s pièce de résistance. He allowed each county, no matter its size, to have only one early polling station—just to be “fair.” But that meant that Cuyahoga County, the home of Cleveland, with over a million residents, a majority of them Black, would have one voting station, same as Vinton County, with fewer than 14,000 residents, including cows, all Republicans. Moo.
BALLOT BINGO
After five hours, the voters were handed a number on a card and an Application for an Absentee Ballot. We were hustled through wide doors, and I thought we’d walked into a bingo game. A skinny white guy in a white short-sleeve shirt was calling out numbers, “Number 175 through 195, please line up behind Frank in the green shirt.”
When a voter’s number came up in a half hour or so, they got in another line to hand in their Application for an Absentee Ballot, got the ballot, filled it out, filled out the envelope to hold the ballot and “mailed” it in a box set up in front of the actual voting machines white folk would use on Tuesday.
I asked the County Clerk why voters were going through this mad rigmarole to get “absentee” ballots when they weren’t absent.
He said, “Because absentee ballots can be disqualified.”
What?
☐ ☐ ☐
MIDNIGHT LAW CLASS
I grabbed an absentee ballot and application and headed off to Columbus, Ohio.
By the time I got to Professor Fitrakis’s home, it was past midnight. An ordinary guy would have slammed the door in my face. But Fitrakis is extraordinary, committed to voting rights law 24/7.
I flashed the “impossible” absentee ballot forms and he directed me to his substantial law library. Despite the hour, the professor gave me a lesson on why absentee ballots have never been given out at voting stations—and the dangers to these votes from Dayton:
You vote absentee, they can pick through the absentee and say, “They didn’t fill this out all the way, they didn’t sign here, they didn’t initial there,” and thus toss the absentee. Essentially they’re treating the absentee like a second-class provisional ballot. None of that can be done in regular early voting.
Husted had thought of everything. What if Black folk withstood frostbite waiting over five hours? They did. I did not see a single voter abandon the line. But Husted had prepared for their persistence. That explained why he barred these voters from using the voting machines. Because, once a vote is cast on a machine, the vote is instantly counted.
But when a vote is cast on paper, especially an “absentee” ballot, the chance of it getting counted is, well, as Professor Fitrakis said, a crapshoot.
Turdblossom Rove knew—even if his Fox News buddies didn’t—that if Husted disqualified about 20% of the early-voting “absentee” Black ballots on technical grounds, Rove would realize his last, best hope of defeating Obama (and defeating the voters). Fritakis went to court, I went on air, and the mass disqualification of Ohio votes—which worked the trick in 2004—failed in 2012. Barely.
☐ ☐ ☐
Why am I talking about Ohio 2012? Republicans are conservatives. They find new ways to block voters, but they conserve the old tricks too.
In November 2016, I returned to Freedom Faith Missionary Baptist. Back in the van with the Souls to Polls. The line was down . . . to three hours. And at the end of the wait, once again, “absentee” ballots for the Souls. Trump won Ohio. Congratulations.