Homeless Voting and Recent Arrest

We Do Not Need This Headline

This week the Plain Dealer and most of the television media reported on the arrest of Darnell Nash for fraud in voting during the last election. The problem is that the PD reported that Nash was homeless and made up addresses in order to vote. I see this as a success for the process. The workers at the Board of Elections in Cuyahoga County flagged Nash and contacted him. Then when he showed up to vote they turned him away. The other issue not addressed in the article was that Mr. Nash is also Santina Gibbs, a transexual, who was not afraid to proclaim that she was in fact a woman to Carl Monday. She was allegedly scamming people last fall, and was caught by Carl Monday and the police in our building. This seems like a big part of the story that was missed by the Plain Dealer. Don't those who are accused of a crime get to be referred to by the sex of their choice in newspapers? If a person outwardly appears as a woman, don't newspapers have an obligation to refer to that individual as a "she"?

We did not need this negative attention for homeless people. Ms. Gibbs will only make it more difficult to convince the legislators of the merit of the registration/voting overlap week. This was a wonderful quirk in the law that allowed hundreds of additional voters in Cleveland. By the arrest of Gibbs aka Nash, we see that the system worked. There was plenty of time before the election day to screen out bogus voters. The Board quickly caught the fact that there was one person registering in multiple locations and that some of these locations were fictitious. In fact, I am not sure that Ms. Gibbs was even able to vote one time. She was pulled out of the line and told that there was a problem with her registration.

Anyway, this attention taints the thousands of legitimate homeless voters. We registered 371 people using sheleter addresses in Cleveland in 2006 and 891 at homeless addresses in 2008. Over 400 people voted during the golden week (overlap week) in Cuyahoga County, which was about one-eighth of the total early voters in Cleveland. Every shelter helped out to make it possible for homeless people to change their address and cast a ballot in the last election. There was so much good that happened with homeless people participating in democracy. It is too bad that people like Ms. Gibbs and those ACORN workers who turned in hundreds of bogus registrations get all the headlines.

Brian
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