News & Commentary

Flock has and surely will continue to give you all sorts of assurances that they are balancing public safety and our civil liberties. The simple fact of the matter, though, is that they have created perhaps the largest and most sophisticated surveillance network in modern history. No government, and no private corporation for that matter, can be trusted with that immense power.

Cleveland’s 100 cameras are connected to all of Flock’s ALPRs, because nationwide data-sharing is turned on by default in a Flock contract.

Our country is better than this, we are better than this, and I am so proud that the ACLU of Ohio is litigating this case so we can live under the law in a society that practices compassion, not cruelty.

We advocate for a narrower version of HB 338 that directly addresses issues of serious prison violence instead of a kitchen sink bill that dilutes the focus on the stated goal of reducing that violence and, we believe, contains various changes that will prove to be counterproductive.

There are several basic questions about the purpose of mail ballots that this committee needs to address before moving forward with a new procedure that ends voting by mail as we know it.

One would think that the state legislature might have more pressing matters to attend to than spending tax-payer funded time to amend our state constitution with something that has already been Ohio law for years.

Voting keeps getting progressively more difficult in Ohio as this body chips away at election laws over the years, always to make it more difficult, but never to facilitate voting and expand the number of qualified voters.

Rather than keeping our neighbors trapped in cycles of poverty and punishment, we believe this legislation will give formerly-incarcerated Ohioans a chance to succeed.

HJR 9 is much less about the underlying policy issue of photo IDs for voters and much more about taking away valuable policy and legislative time to quickly place an unneeded constitutional amendment on the ballot for purely political reasons.