“If we didn’t have a guy like Secretary of State Husted around, we would probably have to invent him.”

That’s that we wrote about John Husted back in December.  What was true then remains true now.

“Voter fraud does exist, but it’s not an epidemic,” Husted recently said in response to a report studying alleged voter fraud and voter suppression.

It was just one year ago that Husted was so fired up about voter fraud that he was demanding a meeting with the United States Attorney General to discuss the fact that some counties appeared to have more registered voters [...]

Republican Prosecutor Wants to Charge Voters Who Did NOT Vote More Than Once

Republicans and their news operations continue to try to suggest that voter fraud was rampant in Ohio in 2012.

Before the 2012 Election, Secretary of State John Husted tried to appease the base by suggesting that voter fraud was a big problem – we noted that after the election, he quickly backed off that claim.  Now, Husted has ordered all county Board of Elections to hold public hearings on voter fraud allegations.  If the allegations are found to be credible, the Boards of Elections can [...]

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine has joined with some other Republican Attorneys General to urge an exception to the requirement in Obamacare that business provide contraceptive coverage for employees.

The most notable thing about DeWine’s letter is that it does NOT suggest that the Obamacare provisions that require contraception coverage are unconstitutional.   This is because the Supreme Court has held that although the government have the ability to accommodate otherwise illegal acts done in pursuit of religious beliefs, it is not required to do so.  The case is Employment Division v. Smith.  You probably heard about it in civics [...]

Republican Part-Time Prosecutor David Fornshell keeps digging himself in a deeper hole.  Fornshell may have broken the law in an effort to clean up a mistake by his office.  A mistake his office made while Fornshell was pursing a politically motivated investigation of a critic of Governor John Kasich.

Earlier this month, we reported on Fornshell’s politically motivated investigation of a school superintendent who criticized the Kasich Administration’s school funding plan.  We called the investigation “bullshit.”  The Cincinnati Enquirer called for an end to the investigation, calling it “heavy handed.”

We later learned that while Fornshell was playing politics and [...]

While our favorite Republican prosecutor, David Fornshell, was busy using his office to play politics for Kasich, the actual work of the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office was slipping through the cracks.

If Fornshell applies the same standard to his office as he does to critics of the Kasich Administration, he will start a criminal investigation into his own office.  But we aren’t holding our breath.

Let us explain.

Fornshell, you may recall, is the part-time Republican Prosecutor who pursued weak criminal charges against a school superintendent who was critical of Kasich’s school funding plan.  Fornshell’s investigation of the Superintendent was [...]

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Warren County Prosecutor David Fornshell has closed his investigation “after Elam agreed to pay costs for his initial letter to the public and sent out a new one saying some of his statements were ‘not appropriate.’”

We are glad to see this come to a just end.  But the damage has been done.  School officials throughout the state will think twice before criticizing Kasich’s school funding plan – as even the most benign criticism could be interpreted as “political” and lead to a criminal investigation.  It’s called “chilling” of speech, and the fact that this [...]