'Never vote Republican again': Ohio voter explains why he's had it with GOP 'nonsense'

An Ohio voter declared he wanted to "never vote Republican again" after what he's seen in the Trump era in a scathing column for the Columbus Dispatch published on Monday.

"I've lived in Ohio for 50 years," wrote Dr. Michael Lederman, a retired professor of medicine for Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "Sometimes the Republican Party has the better candidate on the ballot, and so I’ve voted for Republicans in the past. But I don't think I ever will in Ohio again."

What convinced him to do this wasn't even Trump, he wrote, but the Ohio GOP itself — and specifically, how Alex Triantafilou, the party chair, openly bragged that the party defeated a ballot initiative to prohibit gerrymandering by lying to voters in the ballot language that it would do the opposite, telling colleagues that “confusing Ohioans was not such a bad strategy.”

"The goal of Ohio Issue 1 was to install a bipartisan commission whose job it would be to make sure that Ohio electoral districts were drawn fairly such that each voter in Ohio had a fair chance of being heard," wrote Lederman. "Apparently, this didn't suit Ohio's Republican Party, and so Secretary of State Frank LaRose wrote confusing ballot language precisely so that no one understood it. They knew that when voters are confused by an amendment, they often vote no. Already, these shenanigans are being called 'A Case Study in Ballot Manipulation.'"

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The end result, he said, is that the GOP tricked voters into denying themselves proper representation, perpetuating a system that has allowed corruption to run wild in the state legislature with lawmakers not fearing competitive elections.

"Remember that Republican Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was sentenced to 20 years in prison for running a racketeering conspiracy that took in $60 million in bribes to raise our costs for electricity?" he wrote.

"If you want your vote to be heard and you want to know what you’re voting for in the state of Ohio, think hard before you elect a Republican as secretary of state," Lederman concluded. "And if you're as angry as I am about what happened to Issue 1 in Ohio and the documented Republican corruption in our state government, we need a governor who will not tolerate this nonsense."