Voting rights groups in Ohio are being lauded for their oversight efforts which uncovered massive errors in the state's recent bid to remove hundreds of thousands of voters from its rolls. The inspection, which was carried out primarily by nonprofit volunteers, found that more than 40,000 voters were mistakenly included on the state's to-be-deleted list.
"It definitely showed that Ohio's registration system needs a major upgrade," Jen Miller, the director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, told Cheddar on Monday. "We can't be using a policy as severe as a purge when we can't even be sure that our purge lists are correct."
In an unusual move, this past August Ohio's Secretary of State Frank LaRose publically released a list of 235,000 voters that were set to be deleted from the state's registry. By reviewing the long spreadsheet, the League of Women Voters and several other groups uncovered gross inaccuracies, including the inclusion of Miller's name.
Yet Secretary LaRose, a Republican, has praised the process, saying his office undertook the most transparent review of Ohio's voting rolls to date. "Because of our collaboration with outside organizations, the proper safeguards are in place to ensure any eligible voter will have the opportunity to have their voice heard," LaRose said in a statement after revising the list.
The list maintenance process, as it's officially called, is legally mandated in Ohio and seeks to clear the state's system of deceased residents, inactive voters, or people who have moved out of state. Voter purging, however, has become a major issue nationwide as Republican-led initiatives in several states have sought to remove voters through controversial registration requirements, which critics say primarily target minority or Democratic voters.
Other oversight groups that participated in the review include the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, All Voting is Local, and the Fair Elections Center.
With less than two weeks until election day, a California Democrat, Harley Rouda, has gotten a $4.3 million boost from Michael Bloomberg in his bid to take down 30-year incumbent Republican Congressman Rohrabacher. Bloomberg's Independence USA PAC disclosed the spending last week, which went to advertising targeting the Republican. Rouda said Bloomberg's ad campaign will help bring the issue of climate change to the forefront of voters' minds in the coastal Orange County district.
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Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti mulled a 2020 presidential run in an interview on Cheddar Monday, saying the cure to America's "odious" political sickness may be found in city hall. "I hope that even if I don't run, that mayors will think about jumping in," Garcetti said, "because I think we could cut through a lot of that partisanship right now."
Attending a Trump rally can be daunting for any self-proclaimed liberal ー even more so if your last name is Pelosi. But an experience with her political opposites left Alexandra Pelosi, the documentarian and youngest daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, feeling hopeful. "We all need to burst out of our own bubbles and see what the other people are thinking," Pelosi said Monday in an interview on Cheddar.
Gab, an online haven for white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the alt-right, is facing an increasingly uncertain future. Over the weekend, Gab was linked to Robert Bowers, who is accused of open-firing in a Pittsburgh, Pa., synagogue, killing 11 people and wounding six others. Bowers had a verified account on Gab and used the social network to post hateful, anti-Semitic messages up until the morning of the shooting.
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After a week of political finger-pointing and frayed national nerves ahead of a major election, a Florida man is in custody on federal charges that he sent at least 13 live explosive devices to prominent former and current Democratic officials, a news organization, a Hollywood actor, and liberal donors.
Megyn Kelly's exit negotiations with NBC were underway on Friday, as the network announced that the third hour of valuable morning show real estate she anchored is canceled. "Essentially and effectively she is out," Tony Maglio, TV editor at TheWrap, said Friday in an interview with Cheddar. "It's just a matter of all the legalese and what she'll walk away with."
The multi-year Women in the Workplace report, produced by Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In organization with McKinsey & Company, reveals a stubborn problem of gender diversity in corporate America. As Rachel Thomas, the president of Lean In, explained to ChedHER on Friday, that companies are clearly interested in closing the gender gap ー but they haven't done enough to make it happen yet.
Federal authorities have arrested Cesar Sayoc, Jr. in connection with a dozen packages containing likely explosives. Sayoc has a Florida address and has a criminal record, according to the Broward County Sheriff.
Two additional suspicious packages sent to prominent Democrats were intercepted earlier Friday, only hours before the manhunt appeared to close in on a suspect for the attempted mail bombings now being described as a domestic terrorism.
