Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner: "We Will Be Ready."

By Brad Friedman . Posted September 22, 2008.

I first met Jennifer Brunner during the summer of 2006, at the DNC's summer meeting in Chicago were I was asked to speak to some of their attorneys about the dangers of e-voting and how their party needed to wake up to the battle they faced against this rising menace to democracy.

Brunner was running that year to replace the discredited Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell as Ohio's Secretary of State that year, as hopes for Democratic electoral wins in the Buckeye State, and indeed across the nation -- on the heels of what one Republican scandal after another -- were just beginning to reach a fevered pitch.

As one of the Democrats' great hopes, she was a keynote speaker at one of the conference's main sessions. I took the opportunity to introduce myself after she left the podium, to offer my assistance, should she need it, on matters of e-voting which had vexed Ohio in '04, and were set to get far worse in '06 and beyond.

The exchange was a quick, and even chilly one. It was, after all, back in the day when the bulk of the Democratic Party was in almost complete denial about the perils faced by the still-rising electronic menace; from the utter loss of transparency and the ability for citizens to oversee their own elections on both touch-screen and optical-scan voting machines; to the ease of tampering with such systems; to their alarming error rates and utter lack of testing by anyone; to the fact that these machines often simply failed to work at all, denying thousands, if not millions of voters of their legal franchise on Election Day.

I admit to being less than impressed with her interest in the matter back then, though to be fair, I would hear later, through the grapevine, that she was less than impressed with me in the bargain.

But that was then, and this is now -- following one Ohio election meltdown after another, and then her own version of CA Secretary of State Deborah Bowen's "Top-to-Bottom" review of all of the state's e-voting systems -- Brunner clearly has a different outlook on the nightmare of a system she would be elected to oversee in November of 2006.

The results of Ohio's landmark "Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing" (aptly acronymed "EVEREST") stunned Brunner, as she detailed in an exclusive interview she granted me at just after the test results were released, in late 2007. The findings were a mountain of "critical security failures" in virtually every aspect of Ohio's e-voting systems.

Since then, she's faced fired from virtually every side -- from friend and foe alike, in Ohio, from hard-right Republican partisans, to hostile election officials, to litigious and desperate voting machine companies, to stubborn Democratic-leaning public advocacy groups -- as she's scrambled to try and restore a semblance of democracy to the Buckeye State before what it certain to be the largest, and perhaps most contentious election in the state's history this November.

I had the opportunity to sit down recently, face-to-face this time, for an extended interview with Madame Secretary in Denver, during the Democratic National Convention.

While a fair number of Democratic power players at least seem to have a clue about the myriad Republican attempts to keep voters from voting this year in their ever-surging War on Democracy, concerns about e-voting remain an issue about which many Democrats remain in either complete denial, absolute cluelessness, or paralyzed-fear over the unsubstantiated belief that discussion of such concerns might frighten voters from the polls.

None of those failures of imagination or courage seem to be the case for Ohio's Secretary of State anymore (if they ever were), as she, at the very least, seemed to more clearly than ever, understand the precariousness of the entire system she has been tapped to oversee in one of America's now-most notorious swing states.

In our wide-ranging Q&A, which follows below, she and I discussed a number of noteworthy, and newsworthy, items, including:

• Challenges and surprises she's faced since becoming SoS in 2007, even by constituencies one might think would otherwise be supportive of her;
• Concerns about her tie-breaking decision to move Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) to an all paper ballot system, just 73 days before the state's primary election last March;
• Directives she's issued (and will be issueing) for this year's general election, such as requiring counties to inform all voters that they may vote on a paper ballot; that there must be two lines created at polling places -- one for those who wish to vote on paper, and another for those who prefer to vote on touch-screen; the end of voting machine "sleepovers" at poll worker houses prior to election, and other new security requirements;
• Whether or not there has ever been any accountability for so much that went wrong in 2004, in places like Warren County, where press and public were famously locked out of the counting room on Election Night, or in Knox County where the last vote was not cast at Kenyon College until 4am on the morning following Election Day;
• Concerns about student access to polling places this year, and steps being taken to try to help assure it;
• Whether citizens may use video cameras in the polling place to document what may go on there this year;
• And beyond all of that: Will Ohio be ready for whatever may come this November, and will they be the Buckeye State again in 2008, or the "blackeye" state that they became in 2004.

See more stories tagged with: election protection, george w. bush, democratic party, republican party, jennifer brunner, bob fitrakis, stephen spoonamore, ohio election theft 2004, stolen election, electronic vote count fra, cliff arnebeck, king lincoln bronzeville , kenneth blackwell

Brad Friedman is an investigative journalist/blogger and the creator/publisher of The BRAD BLOG, which has been focusing for some years on the many issues involved in election integrity. He can currently be seen in a number of documentaries now in release around the country, including David Earnhardt's Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections, and the just-released Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story, by documentarian Patty Sharaf.

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