Is the OH GOP trying to undermine SOS Brunner?

[mod mom]

Election board meeting: GOP only


The Associated Press reports:

The Ohio Republican Party has invited Republican elections board members from around the state to gather at a private meeting Tuesday to discuss “the party’s response to the Secretary of State’s voting proposals,” according to an e-mail from a party official obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

The e-mail, which said, “your efforts to keep the information above confidential are appreciated,” comes at a time when Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has directed and recommended widespread changes to touch-screen voting systems across the state.

Elections officials in at least three counties have balked at Brunner’s directive that counties with touch-screen machines make a certain number of paper ballots available during the March primary for voters who don’t want to use the machines.

The counties have also said they will have trouble complying with Brunner’s recommendation that the 57 counties that use touch-screen machines scrap them in favor of an optical-scan system, in which ballots filled out by hand are tabulated by computer scanners.

The private Republican meeting injects partisanship into a debate over voting technology that shouldn’t be political, Brunner said Monday.

-snip
http://frontier.cincinnati.com/blogs/gov/

[mikelgb]

1. yes. n/t

[mod mom]

2. This is where it proves to be advantageous to have a SOS who demands clean elections.

Each county board has 2 D's and 2 R's, in the case of a tie the SOS breaks the tie. They can conspire all they want, but Jennifer breaks the ties.

[EFerrari]

3. You need to call them out in the press.

They tried that here with Debra (and likely will again).

We went to every media outlet and wrote and called and posted comments. My moment of truth was confronting the Editor of the editorial side of the SF Chronicle. I flat out told him that if he was fixing to smear Debra as he'd smeared Kevin Shelley, he'd have the fight of his life on his hands.

And this was a guy who had been publishing my letters every 3 or 4 weeks or so. I'm not sure if I gave him the support he needed to push back internally or put the fear of something in him. Maybe neither. But standing down has never gotten us anywhere.

Let us know if you need back up, mod mom.

[philly_bob]

4. Their Blackwellian machinations will be their undoing.

Look at the blatant disparities between poll results and voting results in a 2005 Ohio referendum on election procedures. See Fitzrakis & Wasserman, http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1559.

Short version: newspaper polls were accurate as usual on other ballot measures, but not on proposition Two, which involved election reform procedures.

The November 6 Dispatch poll showed Issue Two passing by a vote of 59% to 33%, with about 8% undecided, an even broader margin than that predicted for Issue One.

But on November 8, the official vote count showed Issue Two going down to defeat by the astonishing margin of 63.5% against, with just 36.5% in favor. To say the outcome is a virtual statistical impossibility is to understate the case. For the official vote count to square with the pre-vote Dispatch poll, support for the Issue had to drop more than 22 points, with virtually all the undecideds apparently going into the "no" column.

If there's a smoking gun of GOP machine cheating, I suspect it's in Ohio.

[emlev]

5. Ask us something hard.