DEAR EDITOR:
Your Sept. 24 editorial "Safeguard the Ohio election" was the latest example of what has been very unbalanced coverage by the Tribune of Secretary of State Jon Husted's efforts to manipulate voting hours in Ohio to aid his party in November.
News coverage of Husted's original plan to limit voting hours in heavily Democratic counties while keeping polls open longer in Republican counties was difficult to find in the Tribune; later he was given a prominent editorial page opportunity to beat his own chest for his efforts to secure democratic (small "d") rights.
Now the Tribune's own editorial makes some highly dubious statements supporting Husted's efforts to restrict voting.
For example, your opening sentence tells us that "Thoughtful people in both major political parties worry" about voter fraud. Really? This is almost exclusively a Republican Party issue. Please give us the names of the "thoughtful" Democrats who are lying awake at night worrying about voter fraud.
And who are the "analysts" you quote who say that more than 20 percent of Ohio registered voters are not legal? Have they published their "research?"
If that estimate were accurate we should be taking a hard look at the election results that put Republicans in the Ohio Governor's mansion, the Attorney General's office, in control of the State Senate and, of course, put Mr. Husted in a position to manipulate the voting process.
Fortunately, it is far more likely that this claim is nothing but unsubstantiated hogwash. If it were anything else, it would have included actual facts and sourcing.
A good place to look for facts would be in the research done at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, which is a leading national authority on voting issues. According to their research, there actually was voter fraud in a recent Ohio election they studied - at the rate of .00004 percent of votes cast, or approximately the same as someone's chance of being hit by lightning in Ohio.
The Tribune certainly has a right to its own opinions, but not, as the saying goes, to its own facts.
I find it ironic that a business that owes its existence to the First Amendment is so supportive of a partisan national effort to restrict the right of others to express their opinions via the ballot.
Dennis Blank
Vienna