Cleveland rally: ‘Hands off our vote!’

Cleveland 

Some 150 people rallied on June 18 to protest FBI raids the previous week on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative (OOC), a statewide group involved in voter registration. OOC claims to have registered over 160,000 voters in recent years, with a focus on Black and Brown communities and students, a majority of whom have voted for Democrats. The Ohio Legislative Black Caucus has condemned the FBI attack on the organization.

The raids reportedly involved hundreds of FBI agents. They did not invade OOC’s Cleveland office, but targeted current and former staff and volunteers in their homes and vehicles. Agents seized computer files and documents, and the FBI interrogated OOC staff for hours.

Many of the roughly two dozen speakers at the rally accused President Donald Trump’s administration of trying to intimidate voters at a time when Trump’s support among voters is falling. They charged the FBI with being part of racist voter suppression. 

Congressional Rep. Shontel Brown, who represents a big part of Cleveland and multiple East Side suburbs, pointed out that out of 8 million registered voters in Ohio, only six were prosecuted for alleged voter fraud in 2024.

C Stonebraker-Martinez, co-director of the InterReligious Task Force on Central America, linked the FBI attack on OOC to its attack on pro-Palestine activists in Michigan and to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attacks on immigrants and their allies. A Haitian speaker from Columbus, Ohio, emphasized the importance of the Haitian revolution of 1804 in the ongoing struggle for Black liberation. 

The attack on OOC is part of a countrywide attack on the voting rights of Black, Brown and Indigenous communities. This attack is exemplified by the April 29 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States regarding Louisiana v. Callais, which essentially gutted Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That section prohibits any voting rule or procedure that discriminates on the basis of “race, color, or language minority status, to the point of inoperability.”

While voting in and of itself will not ameliorate the myriad of injustices that occur under the racist, capitalist system, it is important to defend the basic democratic right to vote, a hard-fought right won by the Civil Rights Movement.