My father sent me the picture of the billboard you see here. He took it last Friday, just a few blocks away from the Cleveland projects where he grew up. There are more such billboards closer to the part of Cleveland where I was born, and others still in the area where I was raised. There are dozens of them throughout the city, concentrated in neighborhoods where minorities live.

Since they went up—not just in my family’s backyard but also other parts of Ohio and Milwaukee—the billboards have become a national controversy. While legislation aimed at suppressing minority voters twists its way through courts and state legislatures, the billboards seem an unusually direct attempt at voter intimidation. Republicans, meanwhile, greeted them with a shrug: What’s the harm in reminding voters of the law?

Indeed, the billboards do, at first glance, seem a bit misguided: Why not let conservatives spend their money warning about “voter fraud,” a crime that is practically nonexistent? And yet, on seeing the billboards, my first thought was of my cousin in Cleveland, who is an ex-felon. Having long ago served his time, he’s now an educated family man, the embodiment of what The Shawshank Redemption’s Ellis Redding called “rehabilitated.” I thought of him because the word on the billboards—“felony”—might be enough to keep him away from the polls. When you already have a record—as many people in these neighborhoods do—why run the risk of “voter fraud,” which, conveniently, the billboards leave undefined? I’m reaching out to my cousin because I want to know: Does he recognize these ads as a scare tactic, or is he just scared? I’d understand either emotion.

It isn’t a stretch to say that Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County won Barack Obama Ohio the last time around, and will be even more crucial this year. In 2008, President Obama won Ohio by just over 200,000 votes. He won Cuyahoga County by nearly 250,000 votes. His victory in Ohio wasn’t the last to be announced that November night, but it may have been the most politically significant, given that no Republican has ever won the Electoral College without claiming the Buckeye State. Now, The New York Times’ Nate Silver says Ohio is, by far, the most likely state to swing the 2012 presidential election.

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