As GOP makes it harder to vote, few Republicans dissent
ATLANTA – In Arizona, a Republican state senator worried aloud that his party’s proposed voter identification requirements might be too “cumbersome.” But he voted for the bill anyway.
In Iowa, the state’s Republican elections chief put out a carefully worded statement that didn’t say whether he backs his own party’s legislation making it more difficult to vote early.
And in Georgia, Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan left the room as Senate Republicans approved a bill to block early voting for all but the GOP’S most reliable voting bloc. Duncan instead watched Monday’s proceedings from a television in his office to protest.
This is what amounts to dissent as Republican lawmakers push a wave of legislation through statehouses across the nation to make voting more difficult. The bills are fueled by former President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and many are sponsored by his most loyal allies. But support for the effort is much broader than just Trump’s hard-right base, and objections from GOP policymakers are so quiet they can be easy to miss.
“It’s appalling what’s happening,” said former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, who condemned the silence of the GOP’S elected officials. “There have been no provable, obvious, systemwide failures or fraud that would require the kind of ‘legislative remedies’ that Republican legislatures are embarking on. What the hell are you so afraid of? Black people voting?”
Experts note that most changes up for debate would disproportionately affect voters of color, younger people and the poor – all groups that historically vote for Democrats. But Republicans are also pushing restrictions with the potential to place new burdens on Gopleaning groups.
It’s a startling shift for a party whose voters in some states, such as Florida and Arizona, had embraced absentee and mail voting. Several Republican strategists note the party may be passing laws that only box out their own voters.
“There are multiple states and in multiple demographics where Republicans
consistently outperform Democrats in early voting and absentee voting, and they need to be very careful because they could be shooting themselves in the foot to restrict that and make it more difficult,” said Terry Sullivan, a Republican strategist.
If elected Republicans share these concerns, they have done little so far to slow the momentum of major legislation in competitive states like Georgia, Arizona, Florida and Texas, where Republicans control the state legislature and the governor’s office.
Democratic officials, civil rights leaders and voting advocates are horrified.
Martin Luther King III said he spent last weekend in Selma, Alabama, celebrating the 56th anniversary of his father’s bloody march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Instead of being a day of celebration, he said, there was a sense that the civil rights movement was sliding backward because of the Republican voting proposals.
“There’s no question about this being a higher level of Jim Crow,” King said in an interview. He said he’s worried that little can be done to stop the Republican effort in the short term.
“I’m not sure what would make Republicans change other than they lose (in upcoming elections),” King added.
“There has to be a maximum effort so that does happen. They’re going to get very few votes from communities of color.”
Republicans championing the changes insist they’re simply trying to help restore public confidence to the U.S. election system. There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020, but polls suggest that many Republicans doubted the outcome of the election after Trump repeatedly declared, falsely, that he was the victim of illegal voting.
In an interview, Trump ally Ken Cuccinelli used an expletive to describe King’s suggestion that the new laws are designed to disenfranchise African Americans.
“I take great offense to the idea that I’m trying to keep anybody from voting,” Cuccinelli said. “There’s no reason anybody, no matter what color they are, can’t access this system if they’re a legal and appropriate voter.”
In Georgia, the state Senate has voted to limit access to absentee mail ballots to people 65 and over, those with a physical disability and people out of town on Election Day. Legislation passed by the state House would also dramatically reduce early-voting hours, limit the use of early-voting drop boxes, and make it a crime to give food or water to voters standing in line.
During Monday’s Senate vote, several Republicans who represent competitive metro Atlanta districts didn’t vote, including Sen. Brian Strickland. He had tried to amend the bill in committee to remove provisions scrapping no-excuse absentee voting but was unable to muster enough support.
Strickland said he didn’t vote against the bill because he agrees with much of it, except the provision to end no-excuse absentee voting.
“The idea of going backward on that now and requiring excuses, I think it sends the wrong message,” Strickland said.
If ultimately approved by both chambers of the legislature, the change would end broad no-excuse absentee voting put in place in 2005 by a Republican-led legislature, after more than 1.3 million people voted absentee by mail in November.
In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, on Monday signed a Gop-backed bill that requires voting sites to close an hour earlier and shortens the early-voting period to 20 days from the current 29. Voters will be also removed from active voting lists if they miss a single general election and don’t report a change in address or reregister.
Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate, who contradicted Trump’s references to widespread voter fraud last fall and expanded mail-in voting during the pandemic, did not oppose the new law, but he offered no ringing endorsement either after a Latino group sued Tuesday to stop it from taking effect.
“My office will continue providing resources to help every eligible Iowan be a voter and understand any changes in election law,” Pate said. “Our goal has always been to make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat.”
And in Arizona, Republicans introduced dozens of bills to impose new restrictions on voting, many of them targeting the vote-by-mail system that accounts for 80% of Arizona’s ballots.
The Arizona Senate this week voted to require identification such as a driver’s license number or a copy of a utility bill to be included with mail ballots. Republican Sen. Tyler Pace said he worried it would reduce ballot secrecy and pose a serious barrier to the many voters who don’t have a printer at home.
From the safety of her Worthington home, Shannon
Mulligan writes her Friday letter, “Programs like Safe Streets can help curb increasing violence in our city.” She is very happy the city of Columbus will have Safe Streets to help curb violence and “combat the plague.” That’s like viewing the problem from outer space. The rise in violent crime rests directly with the elected officials like Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther, city council and those in his administration who degrade police, support criminals and spread myths concerning police interactions with the public.
The increase in violent crime is NOT due to the stress of COVID-19, local and state restrictions and the economic crisis. Violent crime is not due to police officers and law enforcement. Violent crime walks hand-in-hand with city hall-elected officials, while they wear masks with slogans and velvet gloves. With COVID-19, they have to be extra careful.
I am a lifelong resident and, like so many others, see the city being destroyed, demolished and devasted because of Mayor Andrew Ginther, his lack of leadership, spineless actions and holier-than-thou sneer. He is the reason the city is being run by criminals. He is the reason crime is high. He is the reason we are becoming the next Baltimore.
One last thing. Registered guns owned by lawabiding, tax paying citizens are rarely used in violent crimes. The vast majority of gun crimes are committed by registered felons who, as we all know, are not permitted to own or carry guns.
Therefore, guns used in violent crimes are either stolen or given to the criminal. Criminals have family and friends and pastors and lawyers who know they committed crimes. Criminals’ families and friends already know they are criminals.
Safe streets start in the home. Period.
Carmen Sauer, Columbus
Inside the Incubator Kitchen Collective in Newport, Sam Pellerito opens a blue, plastic barrel of fermenting soybeans and begins to stir them with a large steel paddle. The non-gmo soybeans inside are all sourced from central Ohio and trucked, by Pellerito himself, to Newport, where they are boiled for four hours, combined with toasted and cracked wheat from Carriage House Farm in North Bend, and inoculated with koji – sometimes referred to as Japan’s national mold – that’s grown on fully cooked grains, in this case, rice. The mixture is then incubated for 36 hours in 90-degree temperatures and 85% humidity then placed in the barrels, mixed with a Pacific Sea saltwater brine and aged for four to six months.
That’s not the way most soy sauces are made these days, Pellerito tells me. Instead, the process is often sped up by adding hydrochloric acid that quickly breaks down the beans. That acid is then stripped from the beans with citric acid, which leaves you, as Pellerito says, with “soy sauce-flavored liquid.” Other brands might be brewed in a similar
manner as Pellerito’s, but few have the purity, since they use preservatives and other natural (and unnatural) flavors blended in to enhance their appearance and taste.
As he stirs, large planks of cedar, which give the sauce added flavor, come to the surface like fish bobbing in and out of the ocean. Pellerito lifts his paddle and pours some of the mixture on my finger so I can give it a try. It tastes funky, and salty and nutty and, well, addictive. My first instinct is to track down a ladle and start slurping it like stew. Something my doctor would surely frown upon.
The soybeans I’m tasting have fermented for two months, meaning that, four months from now, they will be pressed, pasteurized, skimmed of impurities and poured into a small glass bottle with a label that reads “Cinsoy Small Batch Soy Sauce.”
That’s right, Ohio is now home to a soy sauce company. And it’s a really good one, too. By taking it slow and relying on traditional methods, Pellerito’s sauce has a rich umami flavor that settles on your tongue longer than those grocery store brands. It also has a semi-sweet, almost caramel-like flavor that makes you wonder why you’ve never paid attention to the taste of your go-to soy sauce before.
When I ask Pellerito how his sauce stacks up against, say, Kikkoman, he is humble, but honest. “Kikkoman is an amazing product,” he said. “They’ve been making it for 400 years and we are envious. But, from a taste standpoint, this is a different world.”
Pellerito, 38, is originally from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and spent his younger years (from 14 to 27) working at restaurants. In 2003, he graduated with a degree in culinary arts from Johnson & Wales University, in Providence, Rhode Island, and later cooked with some of the word’s best chefs in places like Australia and, later, Wales, where he was the only American ever to win a gold medal at the Welsh International Culinary Championship. His entry was a pork roulade with saffron risotto in orange butter sauce. “It was about as 1990s as you can get,” he said. “But they loved it.”
Eventually, Pellerito left the food world, going back to school for a degree in global business and public policy from the University of Maryland, which he was awarded in 2012. It’s that second degree that, up until recently, he got the most mileage from, working in the eyewear industry at companies such as Frameri and Lens.com.
But Pellerito’s interest in cooking never waned. He cooked constantly and spent hours in his home kitchen making fermented foods at home. Ultimately, the intense interest he developed in soy sauce and other Asian foods during his frequent business trips to cities such as Japan and Hong Kong led him back into the food world. “In France, every corner has a baker, but in Hong Kong, every corner has a soy sauce maker . ... I decided to try researching it – to start digging in.”
And Ohio seemed like a perfect place to do it. That’s because, Pellerito says, the state is known throughout the world for the high quality of its food-grade soybeans. Something he learned after asking soy sauce makers throughout Asia where they sourced their soybeans. “They would usually just say they got them from America,” he said. But when Pellerito took a peek at the bags, they all read “Ohio.”
“Ohio has the perfect soil for growing soybeans,” Pellerito told me, adding that the weather, as weird and unpredictable as it might seem, is also a factor in creating the most edible, consistent and protein-rich soybeans in the world.
His first attempts at making soy sauce at home didn’t go so well. During the incubation process, the mixture of soy beans, wheat and koji can heat up to around 130 degrees, leaving his kitchen sweltering. And the first batches he made were sour, or bitter or downright inedible. But after spending time researching the process and discussing it with other soy sauce makers, he finally got it right. But he wasn’t sure if he wanted to make it a full-time gig.
“I don’t think I had a master plan at the time,” he said. “I just thought it was a really tasty product.” Still, he wanted people to try it. And so he started hawking it on Facebook, where the response was strong to say the least. So strong that, last fall, he decided to maybe, just maybe, turn it into a business. Last fall, that’s exactly what he did. And last January, he quit his day job to start making soy sauce full time.
“I started it during a pandemic, which was wild,” he said. “But it might have also been good, because the Cincinnati community really rallied around it. Pellerito found a champion for his products at Madison’s, at Findlay Market.
“It was the first market to carry it and, from the beginning, was immensely supportive and helped spread word,” he said. Pellerito also started selling it at farmers markets, as well as ETC Produce, which is also located at Findlay.
He made about 50 gallons of the stuff to get him through the end of 2020, but it sold out in three weeks, so he made more. Cinsoy is also becoming a local hero among restaurants such as Kiki in College Hill, and Fausto, Downtown, which are using its soy sauce, tofu and other products.
A year ago, when Pellerito told a friend who works for Fifty West Brewing Co. that he was thinking of making soy sauce, the friend told him about another guy named Kendall Holmes who was thinking of doing the same thing.
Deciding he needed more help than competition, Pellerito met Holmes for coffee and they decided to join forces. Holmes was already making his mark on the local culinary scene with an upstart fermented foods company called Cloud Food Labs, which made a deep, funky and delicious koji mustard that 50 West was using on a special Cincinnati-themed goetta burger. (It’s also a perfect addition to your charcuterie board, btw.)
Together, Pellerito and Holmes, now Cinsoy’s chief product officer, are making not just soy sauce, but rich and nutty tofu that might be the best version you’ve ever had, koji mustard, hot sauces, black garlic sauces, a perfectly funky and pungent miso paste made with soybeans and koji spores imported from Japan (I’m literally eating that last one with a spoon as I write this), and even a soy salt that can be used in place of regular sea salt.
Cinsoy is also selling “make-yourown” miso soup kits, as well as a kit that lets you make the miso paste itself at home. They are currently working on a gluten-free tamari sauce (similar to soy sauce) made with buckwheat or millet instead of wheat.
When I visited the company’s Newport facility the other day, it was obviously outgrowing the space. Those blue barrels were piled up on top of industrial refrigerators, and sheet pan racks were everywhere.
And so, like other beloved local companies as Brown Bear Bakery in Overthe-rhine and the Pickled Pig in Walnut Hills – which also got its start at the Kitchen Collective – Pellerito and Holmes will relocate to a larger spot in Over-therhine next month, making Cinsoy a true Cincinnati soy sauce company.