Voter Suppression and Right Wing Money Couldn't Derail Ohio Win

Both items from the AFLCIO NOW blog:

On Friday, writes John Nichols at The Nation, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, ordered county boards of elections to “shut down early voting for…Tuesday’s election.” Earlier this year, the state legislature passed a bill that will greatly reduce early voting and will shut down Sunday voting entirely, but the law is tabled pending a referendum. So Husted appears to have taken matters into his own hands.

Sunday voting often draws a sizable Latino and African American contingent and best serves workers who can’t get time off from their jobs to vote on Tuesday.

Ohio’s voter-suppression legislation and the anti-collective-bargaining legislation—the Issue 2 referendum on which Ohioans will vote on Tuesday—stem from a common source, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, who also fund Americans For Prosperity.

Also from the AFLCIO Now Blog:

Right-wing dollars are showering Ohio’s airwaves and the coffers of anti-labor politicians as Election Day nears for a Nov. 8 referendum on Senate Bill 5/Issue 2. Voting “No” on Issue 2 will revoke S.B. 5, the anti-worker bill supported by Gov. John Kasich and passed by the state legislature earlier this year that effectively eliminates collective bargaining for public employees.

Billionaires Charles and David Koch are known to be substantial donors behind efforts to retain S.B. 5, according to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). A report on the CMD blog, PR Watch, reveals that one Koch-founded organization, Americans for Prosperity, is lending its support to an anti-labor group, the ironically named Building a Better Ohio, which “is expected to spend $20 million on this autumn’s campaign.”

As we reported, the falsely titled Building a Better Ohio (BBO), whose donors remain unknown, is the outfit that lifted footage of Marlene Quinn, from a pro-labor ad and twisted the footage to make it appear as if the great-grandmother was speaking in favor of S.B. 5. We Are Ohio, the pro-labor coalition whose footage of Quinn was stolen, successfully campaigned to have nearly all Ohio TV stations drop the ad.