Don’t trip over hope when you go to vote

Kids are the hope of the future, right? At least, we like to say so. Here’s a triple dose of stories to help think about what we’re doing as adults to grow that hope.

First, from AZFamily.com, this article details how tripping over backpacks causes kids more injuries than wearing them. If you’ve got school-aged kids, you know what they’re talking about.

Now, it would be obscene of me to tell you just how many backpacks we’ve retired over the years because they wore out, didn’t fit everything, were too big, didn’t roll well, or were the wrong color (those go back to the store, as did some of the ones that broke). Even the high-tech mail-ordered one gets used for travel rather than for school. Make fun of suburban mothers, or urban ones for that matter, as we try to pick through the varities available. But switch places with one of us three to ten days before the school year starts and see whose life you prefer.

Here’s a guide from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Love the way they’ve protected the identity of the kids.

Next, a story from the Columbus Dispatch about the record number of kids who used the Summer Reading Club of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. According to the story, their participation was higher than any other similar program in the country. And the numbers were up by 10% over last years.

I’ve used the summer reading programs with my kids for years - usually the Cuyahoga County Public Library’s version. They ply the kids with stickers, pencils, maps, brightly decorated plastic bags for all those goodies and the occasional free book if your slip - indicating how you’ve completed a certain part of the program - is pulled from box. Now that my kids are a bit older and in camp more often than not, we don’t follow the program as diligently as we used to. But we still visit the library, and usually more than one branch, at least once or twice a week. We use the online resources from home and, when a book gets left in a school locker by accident, we see who has what nearest to us (okay, occasionally I’ve had to go to the book store for that).
Last but not least, Salon published a story about voter suppression called Salon’s shameful six. You’ll need to go through free registration if you don’t subscribe but it’s worth it. Sadly, Ohio is not alone in its struggles to make sure every voice is heard and every voice counts. Here’s the Ohio portion.

OHIO

The secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, now the Republican candidate for governor, is using some new vote-suppressing tricks and, this time, he’s got a sweeping if confusing law, HB 3, to back him up. A coalition of voting-rights groups filed suit last month to overturn the law as unconstitutional.

Infamous for such schemes as initially demanding that all voter registration applications be submitted on 80 lb. stock paper, Blackwell also presided over what most investigators regard as the worst election meltdown of 2004. While the allegation that Blackwell helped “steal” the election from John Kerry is debatable, the view that he intentionally suppressed voting by Democratic-leaning groups is less controversial. That the Ohio election was a mess is almost universally acknowledged, although not by Blackwell’s office. His spokesman, James Lee, says, “The critics were wrong then, and they’re wrong now.”

This time around, the law that took effect in May allows the state to pursue felony prosecutions of workers for voter registration groups who turn in registration cards past a 10-day deadline. They face up to 12 months in prison and a $2,500 fine; late returns on less than 50 forms merit a misdemeanor prosecution. At first, Blackwell implied that the workers couldn’t even send in the forms by mail. Each registration worker also has to return the forms personally to the local elections board, which prevents voter registration groups from combining and checking large numbers of forms. “It’s made registration far more difficult,” says Teresa James, Project Vote’s election administration coordinator. In fact, Ohio ACORN, the Project Vote-allied group that focuses on low-income neighborhoods, suspended virtually all voter registration activities for two months. Now it’s gathering less than 20 percent of the 7,000 registration applicants it signed up monthly before the law was implemented.

Even if people do manage to register, most Ohio election boards don’t know that voters are entitled to vote using regular ballots even if their driver’s licenses list old addresses. It’s a confusion created by a series of misleading or opaque directives from Blackwell.

“I think we could very well have a meltdown in November because of these confusing election rules and poll workers not knowing what to do with the new electronic machines,” observes Peg Rosenfield, the Ohio League of Women Voters election specialist. That’s already been shown by the voting crack-up in Cuyahoga County, home of Cleveland, where the sudden switch to electronic machines in May led workers to lose 70 memory cards from touch-screen terminals and a six-day delay in counting 15,000 absentee ballots.

Key races: Democrats could take the governor’s mansion and unseat Sen. Mike DeWine and four House incumbents.

I regard the right to vote as an obligation and if I were Secretary of State (not a happening thing ever but we did discuss this briefly with SOS Dem candidate, Jennifer Brunner at her Meet the Bloggers session), I’d work with the Ohio Department of Education to make sure that the curriculum standards include hefty teaching on how your quality of life and your sense of ownership of this country and its government connect to the obligation to vote because it procures, secures and maintains both of those things.

Hope? It’s out there. I do know this. Kids seems to have it naturally. And as world-weary as we might get in our adulthood, we really shouldn’t ever forget that we can make a difference.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 11:23 am August 18th, 2006 in Politics

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One Response to “Don’t trip over hope when you go to vote”

1 Democracy in Action: The What You Need To Know Ohio Primary List | Writes Like She Talks on March 3rd, 2008 3:33 pm

[…] give background to why Ohio suffers from Post-Traumatic Voter Disorder, I wrote this post in 8/06 which links to a Salon article about six cases of voter suppression. I wrote, in response […]

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