October 17, 2008

Purging Ohio

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PURGING OHIO….A couple of weeks ago the Ohio Republican Party sued the Ohio Secretary of State. Their aim: forcing her to turn over to county officials the raw results of database matching operations for new voter registrations. She had refused because these matching efforts are notoriously unreliable, effectively purging tens of thousands of new registrations because of inaccuracies in the DMV and Social Security databases.

But of course the bulk of new registrations this year are Democratic voters, so the Ohio GOP went to court anyway. Today, in an impressively quick ruling, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against them. I guess Scalia and Thomas must still be feeling guilty over 2000.

UPDATE: Elsewhere, Matt Yglesias makes the case for a national ID card as a way of cutting voter fraud. He doesn’t actually say that, mind you, but that’s how I choose to intepret his tale of voting woe anyway. And I agree.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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