'Challengers' - Blackwell II.A

On October 29, 2004 after Ohio SoS Blackwell issued an elections memo stating

"I have instructed the Attorney General to offer the following recommendation to the federal courts.. for resolution of these matters now: All challengers of all parties shall be excluded from polling places throughout the state,"

therby banning any challenger from any party observing the election process, all media hell broke loose. With charges of 'disenfranchisement, partisan' from the left, countercharges of 'way to stop those leftist cheaters' from the right, and extremists strongly and bitterly denouncing Blackwell all across the media wires, a late-breaking election firestorm broke loose.

So what really happened, why did Blackwell issue such a decree, and what does the law say? The following will examine the slow winding process of the 'challenger' law from its Civil War inception to its current status.

In short, the law allows any party running candidates in any election, generally just the Republicans and Democrats, to place one 'challenger' apiece into various precincts, wherein the designated persons may, if they sense some sort of fraud taking place, challenge a voter's eligibility. Both parties have historically adhered to this tradition without overproducing the numbers of challengers and challenges.

However, the chance exists that such an action could take place owing to the checkered past of the law. In the beginning the disputed election law did indeed originate in the Jim Crow era, if not slightly before it. Sources thus far have traced the law back to pre-Civil War era, since the lawmakers wrote the law back, when no black Africans could legally vote. The legislators designed the law not against blacks, since they were non-entities anyways, but rather to prohibit any white male (women could not vote and would not for another 60 years), whom poll workers suspected of having African blood in his genes, from casting a ballot. Back then, any election official, working in cahoots with a judge, could object to a suspected African-ancestry voter, thereby keeping them from casting a ballot.

In 1867, five years after Abraham Lincoln had enacted the Emancipation proclamation thereby providing the moral impetus to write and pass the 14th and 15th amendments, the Ohio State Legislature slightly amended the law by tossing out the ancestry objection, only. The remaining part of the law retained its force and remained unchanged for another 87 years.

In 1953 the law recieved the wonkish title of Ohio Revised Code, 3505.20. Since the law received its revision, no lawsuit has ever demonstrated the unconstiutional application of the law in any case whatsoever. The laws denies a 'challenger' the right to touch, speak to, or harass any voter. The law allows any 'challenger' the right to speak to a precinct poll official only. While the two parties have used the law, no challenged voter has ever demonstrated a constitutional misapplication of the law, i.e., the 'challenger' always righly applied the law, even if the accusation turned out to be false, and the proper official ruled for the defendent.

Thus the law as revised prohibited any discrimination against the voters. In 1964 the federal statute pulled even with Ohio's state statute. Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson, along with Republican Senate Majority Leader Everett Dirkson (IL) and 21 of his republican colleagues, passed the 1964 Civil Rights act. The Southern Democtrats along with eight Republicans, including the Republican nominee for president, Senator Barry Goldwater (AZ) voted against the bill's passage.

The latter lost. The Republican party was seriously maimed, because LBJ successfully labeled the Republican Establishment during the '64 campaign as discriminatory for having opposed the Civil Rights Act. In accordance with the law then, the South desegragated its business establishments. South and North were racially united.

However, the law, as twice ammended, possessed gigantic possible trouble-spots for every good that it worked. The next section will examine the law in actuality.

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