Republicans' nonsense is convincing me to NEVER vote Republican again | Opinion

Republicans' nonsense is convincing me to NEVER vote Republican again | Opinion

Dr. Michael Lederman is professor of medicine (emeritus) at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Pathogens and Immunity www.paijournal.org.

I've lived in Ohio for 50 years.

Sometimes the Republican Party has the better candidate on the ballot, and so I’ve voted for Republicans in the past.

But I don't think I ever will in Ohio again.

That's because the Republican Party chairman, Alex Triantafilou, has publicly said that confusing Ohioans wasn't such a bad strategy.

This reflects the Ohio Republican secretary of state’s bizarre wording of Ohio Issue 1 in last November's election. I don't know anybody who understood it, and that apparently was the intent.

The goal of Ohio Issue 1 was to install a bipartisan commission whose job it would be to make sure that Ohio electoral districts were drawn fairly such that each voter in Ohio had a fair chance of being heard.

Apparently, this didn't suit Ohio's Republican Party, and so Secretary of State Frank LaRose wrote confusing ballot language precisely so that no one understood it. They knew that when voters are confused by an amendment, they often vote no. Already, these shenanigans are being called "A Case Study in Ballot Manipulation." And this has consequences.

Because we Ohio voters do not have fair representation in our elections, the Ohio state government has been rife with corruption for years.

Remember that Republican Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was sentenced to 20 years in prison for running a racketeering conspiracy that took in $60 million in bribes to raise our costs for electricity?

And it wasn't just Republican Householder.

The Chairman of the Ohio Republican Party at that time, Mathew Borges, and two of his Republican political strategists were also found guilty of conspiring in this racket (as cited above).

If you want your vote to be heard and you want to know what you’re voting for in the state of Ohio, think hard before you elect a Republican as secretary of state.

And if you're as angry as I am about what happened to Issue 1 in Ohio and the documented Republican corruption in our state government, we need a governor who will not tolerate this nonsense.