Voter suppression in Ohio

I went to vote this afternoon after work but was barred from so doing because I had left my driver's license in another wallet and didn't have it with me. Feeling tired and grumpy, I went home and figured, oh, the hell with going back out tonight and voting, I'm too damned tired and in no mood to go back out for the night. But I eventually relented, knowing that there are several critical ballot issues up for a vote today, so I swallowed my pride and went back to vote. What angered me is that this year, Ohio passed the single most punitive voting law in the nation in an effort to suppress the vote in a state critical to President Obama winning re-election next year. Nobody has ever made it to the White House without winning Ohio. So of course, the Republican legislature in Ohio passed a measure to suppress the votes of Democratic leaning populations: poor and people of color and elderly voters who may no longer drive and thus do not have a photo ID. This just goes to show how low the GOP has gone in order to prevent Democrats from casting ballots. When I expressed my anger about this to the poll workers, one gentlemen told me that it's been the law for six years now. Not so, I countered. It was only this year that the GOP led state legislature passed the law that made a photo ID a mandatory requirement to cast a ballot. I know because I did the research after I came home from trying to vote the first time. Hey, I am a paraprofessional librarian, don't mess with someone like me who knows how to do her research! I mentioned to the poll workers that in essence this was voter suppression and a law looking for a problem that never existed. In 2002, for example, ballots cast by ineligible voters in Ohio only amounted to 0.00004% of the votes cast, hardly enough to call a serious problem. And 890,000 Ohioans lack a state photo ID, and disproportionally those people are Democratic leaning poor people, Asians, African-Americans and Latinos. So this whole voter ID law is nothing more than smoke and mirrors aimed at a problem that never existed. More restrictive laws are about to be put into place as well as we enter the height of the Presidential election season in order to prevent Obama from being able to take Ohio. Republicans will stop at nothing to defeat him, even taking away the right to vote, and they are being shamelessly open about how their Number One agenda is to stop the President at all cost. They're putting party ahead of country and I consider that to be treason of the highest order to deny people the right to cast a ballot to vote for issues and candidates that matter to them. It makes me so angry that I don't know what to do but to fight tooth and nail against this sort of oppression. I just hope that Issues 2 and 3 here in Ohio go down to defeat tonight to send a powerful message to these overreaching Republicans that we won't take it anymore. It's time for us to take our state and our country back, one issue, one vote, one protest at a time. A big THANK YOU to the Occupy Together Movement for empowering people to find their voices again and fight back against these overreaching Republicans and their attempts to beat us down. There are more of us than there are of them and we won't stop until we've taken back our country.