Ari Berman | The Nation

Thanks to a wave of new voting restrictions passed by Republicans, the 2012 election was already shaping up to be pretty chaotic before the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, which left 8.2 million households without power in 15 states and the District of Columbia.

The good news? All of these states should have power mostly restored by Tuesday. The bad news? Many of these states will still experience the potential for serious problems, either on Election Day or the days proceeding (early voting has already begun in a number of states affected by the storm). Problems could include: electronic voting machines without power and a shortage of backup paper ballots; polling places without power, damaged or moved; voters unable to reach their polling place or unable to mail in an absentee ballot by the deadline; election administration unprepared to deal with a multitude of new, unforeseen complications.

“There’s no manual for how to run an election in the wake of a natural disaster,” says Eric Marshall, director of legal mobilization for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. “The storm creates a whole other set of complications. Before you had questions of: Did people have the right ID to vote? Would they be challenged at the polling place? Would they be on the voting rolls? Now you have another set of questions: Will there be electricity to power the voting machines? Are some of the polling places damaged? Can they relocate polling places in advance? Can people get to the polling place? Will there be less people voting because they have other concerns to deal with?”

As of Wednesday, power outages were the most severe in New Jersey (2.4 million homes and businesses without power), New York (1.9 million) and Pennsylvania (1.2 million). Sandy could depress Obama’s turnout in large blue states like New Jersey and New York, affecting the president’s popular vote total, while impacting the results in crucial battlegrounds like Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Let’s start with Pennsylvania. According to The Washington Post: “In Pennsylvania, officials said that getting all the polls open in all sixty-seven counties on Election Day may be problematic. About 1.2 million customers in Pennsylvania lost power in the storm, and utilities warned that full restoration might be more than a week away. All of the nine counties with the bulk of the power losses went for Obama in 2008.”

And on to Virginia. “Nine Virginia communities—including several in Northern Virginia that were key to President Obama’s victory in the commonwealth in 2008—remained closed for in-person absentee voting Tuesday in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy,” reported the Post.

At least six states hit by the storm (Maryland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Jersey, Virginia, West Virginia) use electronic voting machines with limited paper ballot backups. “In those locations, unless they have enough emergency paper ballots printed up to accommodate the entire electorate at precincts where power remains disrupted on Election Day, there could be very serious and unprecedented problems,” reports Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog. Friedman noted that in Pennsylvania, “in case of power loss, local election officials are encouraged to keep enough paper ballots on hand for 20 and 25 percent of their registered voters," reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. That seems woefully inadequate given the magnitude of the storm.

States impacted by Sandy could extend polling hours on Election Day or during early voting. But any vote cast during extended hours within ten days of the election must be done via provisional ballot, notes Rick Hasen, author of The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown. In 2008, 31 percent of the 2.1 million provisional ballots cast nationwide were not counted.

Hasen is urging states affected by the storm to print as many backup paper ballots as possible, open as many polling places as feasible, and ensure that all locations have power through the night. “We haven’t had anything like this in recent memory, on this scale,” he says.

Regardless of who wins the election, the most important part of the electoral process is that every eligible vote is counted. The integrity of the election was already under siege due to GOP voter suppression laws. Hopefully, Sandy won’t make a bad situation even worse.

(Infographic from the Huffington Post)

For more on Hurricane Sandy, check out Michelle Dean on FEMA, inequality and the need for better government.

Barack Obama did a nice job of debunking Mitt Romney’s plan to cut taxes for the wealthy in the second presidential debate. He also pointed out that Romney, according to his tax estimate for 2011, paid a “lower tax rate than a nurse or a bus driver.” But Obama failed to make another significant point: Romney has still not released many crucial details about his tax returns.

The media have stopped pressing Romney for more information about his tax history, which is unfortunate, since there’s still a lot we don’t know. The 2010 tax return Romney released in January, which showed that he paid a rate of 13.9 percent in income taxes, did not provide details about his offshore accounts in places like Switzerland, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. (In his 2011 tax returns, where he claimed to pay a rate of 15.4 percent, Romney did not check the box indicating he had any foreign accounts.) And he released only a brief summary of his taxes from 1990 to 2009, when he claims to have paid an average of 20.2 percent in federal income taxes.

Romney’s lack of financial disclosure is virtually without precedent. According to Fact-Check.Org:

It’s true that in the 2008 election, Republican nominee McCain released just two years of tax returns. But you have to go back more than 30 years—to President Ronald Reagan, who released one year’s return in 1980—to get to a major party nominee who released less than five years of tax returns.

Over those three decades, the number of years of released tax returns went from a high of 30 by Republican Bob Dole in 1996 to a low of five by Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988.

In 2000, George W. Bush released nine years of tax returns and Al Gore released eight. John Kerry released twenty years in 2004. Barack Obama released seven years in 2008. McCain only released two years in 2008, but, aside from forgetting how many houses he owned, McCain’s financial accounting was far less complex than Romney’s. George Romney famously released twelve years of tax returns, saying, “one year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.”

Here’s what we still don’t know about Romney’s taxes:

Along with his missing Report on Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) from 2010, Romney should have released a 990-T form for his IRA, which is for unrelated business taxable income. That includes income from private equity accounts, which Romney has in his IRA. The fact that Romney hasn’t released such a form “suggests he owns them through an offshore blocker corporation,” said Rebecca Wilkins, senior counsel for Citizens for Tax Justice. “That would be entirely at odds with his statement that his offshore investments have never saved him a dime in US income taxes.”

Romney’s massive, tax-free IRA is estimated to hold between $18 to $87 million. “You can hardly get your head around it,” said Wilkins. “Congress never, ever anticipated that anyone would have $87 million in their IRA.” Even by the standards of the super-rich, Romney’s IRA is super-sized. Wilkins did tax planning for wealthy clients for twenty-one years and said, “‘I never saw a $10 million retirement plan—certainly never saw anything in neighborhood of $87 million.” She said that, “the Treasury is losing somewhere between 250,000 and $3 million a year in tax revenues on Romney’s earnings from his IRA.”

Then there’s the manipulation of his tax returns from 1990–2009. “We know almost nothing about them and they’re completely misleading,” Wilkins said. “The way PricewaterhouseCoopers computed the average rate was a total joke.” The accounting firm took the rate from each year without accounting for how much Romney made in a given year. For example, if Romney paid 35 percent in taxes on $250,000 in income one year and 15 percent in taxes on $50 million another year, his weighted average “is going to be a lot lower than what he reported—closer to 15 percent,” Wilkins said.

Romney has said, “I never paid less than 13 percent” in taxes, but there’s no way to verify that claim based on the limited documentation his campaign has released. Nor can we say definitively that Harry Reid was wrong to suggest that Romney didn’t pay any taxes for a decade. “Unless we see the returns, you can’t say that’s not true,” said Wilkins. “It’s quite possible there were some years when he never paid taxes.”

Wilkins points to a few pieces of damning suggestive evidence. “In the early nineties, Romney made the decision at Bain Capital to move funds to the Cayman Islands to attract investors who didn’t want to pay taxes,” said Wilkins. Romney said in August that “big business is doing fine in many places” by exploiting “low tax havens around the world for their businesses.” Romney, evidently, has done the same.

Reports Mother Jones:

Romney has investments in a number of well known tax havens, including Ireland, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda. Until 2010, he held a few million in the Swiss bank UBS, which in 2009 was forced to pay the US $780 million in fines and penalties for helping more than 17,000 Americans commit tax fraud by hiding as much as $20 billion overseas. The total value of Romney’s offshore investments is unknown, but his tax returns have revealed that he has at least $30 million invested in the Cayman Islands, in at least 12 different Bain Capital funds.

Similarly, Romney was chair of the audit committee at Marriott from 1993-1998 when the hotel chain undertook what Peter Canellos, a former chair of the New York State Bar Association Tax Section and Ed Kleinbard, a law professor at USC, called “perhaps the largest tax avoidance scheme in history.” According to Bloomberg: “During Romney’s years on the board, Marriott’s effective tax rate dipped as low as 6.8 percent, compared with the federal corporate statutory rate of 35 percent.” Said Wilkins: “There’s no way he didn’t know about it. If he was willing to sign off on it for Marriott, why wouldn’t he do that himself?”

Why does this matter? “We can see in the Romneys’ returns a myriad of ways that high-income taxpayers can reduce their tax rates that just aren’t available to ordinary taxpayers,” said Wilkins. “The returns confirm what most Americans believe about the federal income tax system—that it’s rigged in favor of the rich. And we know from Romney’s tax proposals that he has no plans to change that.”

Under Romney and Ryan’s tax plans, people making over $1 million would get an average tax cut of between $250,000 to $400,000 a year, according to Citizens for Tax Justice. Romney can only pay for that massive tax cut for the wealthy by exploding the deficit, like George W. Bush did, or by drastically cutting the social safety net, as Ryan has proposed to do. Either policy would be unpopular, which is why Romney has released so few details about how he’d pay for his tax cuts. Romney’s tax history gives us a clue as to how he would govern—and that’s why the candidate wants to leave us in the dark.

For more on Mitt’s tax returns, check out Ben Adler on “Romney’s Ungenerous Donations.”

The Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously rejected an appeal by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted to overturn a lower court decision upholding early voting in Ohio three days before the election. The ruling was a major victory for voting rights—and yet another defeat for voter suppression efforts—allowing Ohio voters to cast a ballot when it’s most convenient and hopefully forestalling the long lines that marred the outcome of the 2004 election in the state.

That’s the good news. The bad news? Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted swiftly limited early voting hours on those crucial three days to 8 am–2 pm on Saturday, November 3; 1–5 pm on Sunday, November 4; and 8 am–2 pm on Monday, November 5. That means Ohio voters will have a total of only sixteen hours to cast a ballot during those three days. And before the weekend before the election, Ohio voters will still not be able to cast a ballot in-person on nights or weekends.

In 2008, the most populous counties in Ohio allowed more time for early voting—both in terms of days (thirty-five) and hours (on nights and weekends in many places). For the three days before the election, early voting locations were open for a total of twenty-four hours in Columbus’s Franklin County (8-5 on Saturday, 1-5 on Sunday and 8-7 on Monday) and 18 and a half hours in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County (9-1 on Saturday, 1-5 on Sunday, 8:30-7 pm on Monday). During those final three pre-election days in 2008, 148,000 votes were cast and “wait times stretched 2 1/2 hours,” reported the Columbus Dispatch.

But the reduced hours in 2008 are certainly better than nothing, especially since the elimination of weekend and evening voting between October 2 to November 2 will make voting on the weekend before the election even more desirable. “This weekend is going to be very popular,” says Ellis Jacobs of the Miami Valley Voter Protection Coalition. “Ten of thousands of people across the State will take advantage of these days. In addition to making it possible for working people to vote in-person early, the extra hours will help take some of the pressure off polling places on Election Day.”

Voting on the Sunday before the election will also allow African-American churches to hold their traditional “Souls to the Polls” voter mobilization effort. This is a big deal, since African-Americans comprised the majority of early voters in cities like Dayton and Cleveland in 2008, and were twenty-six times more likely to vote in-person compared to white voters in Cuyahoga County in ’08.

Early voting numbers for 2012 are still a bit murky in Ohio, which does not report the early vote by partisan affiliation, but early vote guru Michael McDonald says “early voting is up quite a bit over the 2008 level.” It’s difficult to see how President Obama will win re-election without carrying Ohio, and how he wins Ohio without a very strong early vote turnout.

For more on the fight over early voting in Ohio, see “Ohio’s Secretary of State Subverts Voting Rights,” “Ohio GOP Admits Early Voting Cutbacks Are Racially Motivated” and “Ohio Early Voting Cutbacks Disenfranchise Minority Voters.”

Voting Rights Watch, our joint-project with Colorlines, is also reporting on voting rights fights across the country.

Once again, political experts are predicting that the 2012 presidential election could be decided in the battleground state of Ohio, like it was in 2004.

Remember what happened that year? George W. Bush won the state by a narrow 118,000 votes in an election marred by widespread electoral dysfunction. “The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters,” found a post-election report by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. According to one survey, 174,000 Ohioans, 3 percent of the electorate, left their polling place without voting because of massive lines in urban precincts and on college campuses. Ohio’s Secretary of State that year was Ken Blackwell, co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign.

Ohio’s GOP secretary of state in 2012, Jon Husted, is proving to be a worthy successor to Blackwell. He has banned early voting hours on nights and weekends in Ohio, when it is most convenient for most Ohioans to vote, has fired Democratic election commissioners who challenge his voting restrictions, and is now appealing a court decision reinstating early voting on the three days prior to the election—which the GOP eliminated except for members of the military—to the US Supreme Court. Early voting has already begun in Ohio, but four weeks out until the election, Husted is doing his damndest to confuse the hell out of Ohio voters and undermine their voting rights.

Early voting emerged as a popular reform in Ohio in response to the 2004 election. Nearly 30 percent of Ohioans voted early in 2008. It was only after Barack Obama built a huge lead among early voters in 2008 that Republicans decided to curtail early voting following the 2010 election.

One hundred and forty-eight thousand votes were cast in 2008 during early voting hours eliminated by Husted and the Ohio GOP. The restrictions on early voting disproportionately harm African-American voters, who just so happen to be Obama’s strongest supporters in the state. African-Americans comprise 21 percent of the population in Franklin (Columbus) and Montgomery (Dayton) counties, 24 percent in Hamilton County (Cincinnati) and 28 percent in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) but accounted for 31 percent, 52 percent, 42 percent and 56 percent of early voters in the respective counties in 2008. (Nearly half of early voters in Franklin County in 2008 cast ballots on nights or weekends.) “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine,” Franklin County Republican Chair Doug Preisse infamously told the Columbus Dispatch in August. Black voters in Cuyahoga County used in-person early voting at a rate twenty-six times greater than whites in 2008, according to a new study by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.

97,000 votes were cast in Ohio in 2008 during the last three days of the election, which Husted and the Ohio GOP want to eliminate (except for Republican-learning members of the military), and two courts recently reinstated. “The majority (57 percent) of these 97,000 votes were cast in thirteen larger counties, disproportionately affecting African-Americans and low-income voters,” found a report from the Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates. The Obama campaign argued in court that it made no sense to allow early voting for members of the military but no one else in Ohio, which the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit recently agreed with. By appealing the ruling to the Supreme Court, Husted is restricting the right of all voters, military voters included.

Responded Bob Bauer, general counsel of the Obama campaign:

There is no justification for the state’s arbitrary actions this year in trying to deny the vast majority of its voters access to open polling places for the last three days before the election. This has been the unanimous conclusion of the courts that have considered this case.

The Secretary of State has now chosen to extend the litigation and to ask the United States Supreme Court to intervene just four weeks before the election. We have no reason to believe that he will meet with any more success now than before.

It is a shame that the Secretary would not have committed his office’s energy instead to implementing the outstanding court orders and administering the orderly and effective early voting process that has served Ohio voters so well since 2005.

The election is twenty-eight days away and Ohio voters still can’t vote during the most convenient times before Election Day—on nights, weekends or the weekend before the election. The prospect of the Supreme Court’s getting involved will add further confusion. Rick Hasen, an elections expert at the UC-Irvine School of Law and the author of The Voting Wars, says the Court may be reluctant to intervene so close to the election, but “if they do take it, I think they would reverse [the lower court].” The Supreme Court intervening on behalf of Republicans to decide a presidential election in a critical battleground state? Sadly it’s happened before.

Obama urges his supporters to vote early in Ohio

For more on battles over voting rights in swing states, check out Kate Sedinger’s report from Nevada.