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.
Recreational pot went legal across Canada at midnight on Wednesday, but that doesn't mean everyone was able to get their hands on bud right away. Baker Machado takes a province-by-province look at what it'll take to smoke up and how Canada's journey could inform the U.S.
Jodie Emery, editor-in-chief of Cannabis Culture, said activists are celebrating Canada's legalization of cannabis but they aren't done fighting. The next battle in Canada will be granting amnesty to people convicted of non-violent marijuana charges, Emery said.
Comedians Anthony Atamanuik and Adam Pally are the faces of the new Comedy Central 'mockumentary' special, "The President Show." They discuss their method of observing President Trump.
Canada legalized recreational marijuana use on Wednesday, making it the second country to do so. Netflix stock is surging after the streaming giant added a record number of subscribers in the third quarter. Plus, Anthony Atamanuik and Adam Pally from Comedy Central's 'The President Show' join Cheddar to talk about their new special 'The Fall Of Donald Trump.'
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Cheddar went to Montréal to get an up close look at the cannabis legalization effort, which begins Wednesday across Canada.
Washington, D.C., delayed the final vote on a bill that would severely limit operations for home-sharing companies like Airbnb and VRBO in the nation's capital in a surprise move by the D.C. Council Tuesday afternoon. The proposed regulations would ban short-term rentals of secondary properties in D.C. and put a 90-day cap on Washingtonians renting out rooms in their primary residences.
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Prominent business leaders have announced that they will not attend a high-profile conference in Saudi Arabia due to the current controversy surrounding the disappearance of a Washington Post journalist. Dan Primack, business editor at Axios, said while it's partly a PR move, if companies decide to pull out of business deals with Saudi Arabia it could be a huge detriment to the kingdom's economy.
Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch said that the alleged murder of Jamal Khashoggi is finally opening up the eyes of the world to the "grotesque" human rights abuses from the Saudi kingdom.
