"We're trying to make voting easier, faster, more convenient, and most of all, more easier," said Grover B. Frobe, the head of Ohio's Election Commission. "Drive-Thru voting will accomplish all of those goals. No more lines, no more parking headaches, you'll drive right up, cast your vote, and drive right out."
When asked whether drive-thru voting will discourage those without cars or driver's licenses from voting, Republican Governor Kasich replied, "It's 2012, who doesn't have a car?"
See, in the United States, we have election officials, people whose sole job is to oversee elections, make sure there is no vote tampering, no vote fraud, the counting is done correctly, no ballots disappear, nobody is going around intimidating voters, or any other nonsense. Great idea, except that our election officials are partisan, meaning they are Republicans or Democrats. So what could possibly go wrong when the election official of a precinct where 80% of the voters are Democrats is a Republican? Thirty-three states have introduced Voter ID Laws just this year, all of them by Republicans in the State legislatures, signed by Republican Governors. Requiring voters present a driver's license which isn't free to get, and for many people, especially poor people who don't own cars, an unnecessary item, means that across those states, thousands of people will not be able to vote unless they obtain a new government ID (and we all know the DMV is easily capable of dispensing hundreds of thousands of new IDs all at once).
You might wonder, why does it matter? The election is going to end up being 51-49 for one of the candidates in the popular vote, so making voting a little harder for everyone will hurt each candidate equally. Right?
That might be true if poor people were split 50-50 on Obama or Romney, or if Black voters were equally split. However a poll released last week showed that Obama led Romney among likely Black voters by a razor thin margin of 94% to 0%. That's right, a national poll couldn't find a single black person planning on voting for Romney. Latinos favor Obama two-to-one. Women favor Obama. In fact, the only demographics in which Romney leads are in White Men and the Elderly.
Ohio, one of the swingiest of swingy states, is controlled by a Republican Governor, Republican State Senate, and Republican Election Board. These totally trustworthy and impartial Republicans wouldn't dare threaten the democratic process by making it much harder for Democrats to vote while making it easier for Republicans to vote, of course not! That's why they ended early voting in predominantly black and poor precincts, while extending early voting in predominantly rich, white, old people areas. "We weren't trying to make it harder for quadroons to vote," Grover B. Frobe explained, "Black people like crowds and big events, we were just trying to encourage them to all go on the same day, so they could shout out to their peeps and carpool and such. It's like a party and they're all invited."
This week the state election board announced that they would convert polling places into drive-thrus to speed up the process of voting. "Voting should be easier and faster, and what's easier or faster than delicious McDonald's food?" Frobe explained, while eating a Big Mac.
Lucious Theodis Malrom, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Bad-Ass-Mo-fos (NAABAMFS), believes this move is part of a honkey conspiracy: "They know brothers and sisters can't drive, how we supposed to vote? Next thing you know, the ballot is gonna be in some secret white language like Latin or Canadian."
Mitt Romney the Republican nominee, kept with his recent practice of pivoting every question to something about the economy, when he said "You people vote in person? I just pay a guy to vote for the whole family. It's his job, see I'm a job creator. This guy has a job because I pay him for a service, and then when he gets the money, he goes to a bank so that the bank can turn the Swiss money into US Dollars, so that gives a banker a job, and somebody had to print that Swiss Franc, so there's a woodcutter guy and one of those paper people and all those kinds of things that have jobs because of how I vote. That's my voting record as a job creator. Obama doesn't create those jobs."
When asked about the new tactics of the GOP, former President George W. Bush said, "Why don't they just rig the machines like turd-blossom did? Or kick all the people who might be felons off the voter rolls, you know, anybody darker than Wesley Snipes, that's what Jebby did in Florida and that worked. I guess they're trying to sell more cars in Ohio, it's a pretty good idea for a stimulus package, buy a car, vote for president, that's a good sales pitch. Where are you going, I got plenty more ideas, I haven't talked to anyone in months. Please don't go."
Meanwhile former Governor Romney is facing stiff questions about the GOP's apparent voter suppression tactics. When asked why he has zero support from African-Americans in a recent poll, Romney replied: "Well, whenever you see a number like that, you have to think that Racism plays a big part. You don't ever see a poll saying all white people agree on something, or all Latinos or all Asians, or all Millionaires. But this shows all Black people are on one side of the fence. Clearly they're just racists who think that they have to vote for the Black president because he's black like them. It's sad really, because Obama is hurting them. Under my economic plan, they would be learning new skills and finding all kinds of new jobs, because of the Welfare reform, plus with all the tax cuts for the job creators, that money would inject all kinds of things into the black community. To find polling data like that, I think you probably have to go back to Nazi Germany to find that many people all agreeing on something. I'm not saying we're heading for a race war or anything like that, so don't twist my words around, but I'm just saying, where there's smoke, there's ovens filled with people you hate, know what I mean?"
There are 70 days left until the General Election.
