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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Finally, Clarification of ID Rules

Brunner Clarifies Voting Requirements

The Coalition sued Blackwell last year to assure that homeless people had a right to vote in the November election. Subodh Chandra and his legal team did a great job in getting clarification of the rules for the last election, but the case still goes on. We are hoping that the legislature will clarify the rules and strike down the ID requirements, but until then the Secretary of State issued a directive. We waited 10 months for Blackwell to explain the rules and he never got around to it. These new rules are basically the same as the settlement that we agreed to last year with the State of Ohio. Here is the link to the Secretary of State's statement clarifying the rules. The ID requirements were a stupid rule passed by a terrified Republican party to keep down Democratic turnout. So, while this stupid requirement for showing ID in order to vote is still the law of the land in Ohio, Brunner's directive is the best that we can do under the current law.

All of this touches on battles that are going on in Washington DC over the firing of the U.S. Attorneys. We keep hearing that the Bush Administration and specifically Karl Rove wanted all these U.S. Attorneys fighting "voter fraud" around the country. They keep talking about these mystery multiple voters, and massive registration fraud. State Rep. Kevin Coughlin had the same file of possible voting violations during the hearings held last year before the HB 3 ID rules were passed, and these were the same files that were being pushed on the U.S. Attorneys. These are all minor cases in which a person registers Michael Jordan or Mickey Mouse, but in nearly every case these made up voters do not show up to vote. There is not this huge wide spread conspiracy. There are isolated problems usually from voter confusion, and the U.S. Attorney's were right to resist moving on these issues. It is too bad the State of Ohio legislators did not resist the pressure to pass legislation over a problem that did not actually exist.

Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.