From The Columbus Dispatch:

“Any political party supporting candidates on the ballot … may appoint one person to each polling location as a challenger during the casting of ballots…. Any person voting may be challenged…. Voters’ eligibility may be challenged on four grounds: they are not U.S. citizens, they haven’t lived in Ohio for at least 30 days before the election, they do not live in the county where they are voting, they are not at least 18 years old. Voters who are challenged must sign an affidavit responding to the reasons challenged.”

The affidavit, it turns out, is even more intimidating than it at first sounds:

Voters who are challenged will be asked to fill out a two-page form stating their name, if they are a U.S. citizen, where they were born, if they have resided in the state 30 days, the names of two persons who know where they live, the county and precinct in which they live, and if they are of legal voting age.

The bottom of the form contains the following warning in bold type: “Whoever commits election falsification is guilty of a felony of the fifth degree.”

All of this begs the question: how the heck will they be able to spot people to challenge? What does a person who has not lived in Ohio for 30 days look like? Could you spot someone from a different county? It is not hard to predict that the Republican challengers will be well-trained to spot the most vulnerable voters and force them to go through all of this in order to vote. Voters who appear to be in a hurry will doubtless be targeted as well. And it is without doubt that the GOP challengers will spot the Democrats chiefly by their color.

Additionally, the GOP is challenging 35,000 newly registered voters in Ohio–Democrats, of course, mostly minorities–before they even get to the polling places. The GOP is claiming that a mass mailing they did to new registrants generated a large number of returned mail, suggesting incorrect addresses, in turn suggesting bogus registration. However, there is grave doubt as to the legitimacy of these claims; the GOP has most likely simply found a new way of keeping Democrats from voting. Those Democratic areas being challenged are now being thrown into turmoil, with tens of thousands of Democrats being forced to appear at hearings to prove that they are truly eligible to vote. In short, the GOP found a new way to legally intimidate voters, making them jump through hoops before they can be allowed to vote.

Not that they’ll admit to it, of course; in order to make their intimidation appear legitimate, they have been claiming to the press that this is all about voter fraud on the part of the Democrats; for example, they claim that many false registrations were made by a man who “was paid in crack cocaine for his registration efforts by a representative of the NAACP.” There are truly no depths that they will not lower themselves to.