Another ACORN Secretary of State in Minnesota will be running the Coleman-Franken recount

ACORN does a fine job -- some of it's workers have committed fraud on it, not on you. They paid the money, you didn't.

You're not part of the solution, if you think that blaming ACORN is going to solve all your problems.

The solution is to take private entities out of the whole voter registration business. Talk solutions, don't throw blame around.

Even if I wanted to give you credit that you had found something that stunk... well, there's always Missouri for voter suppression, or Arizona, or Virginia. You wonder why there wasn't a recount for Allen '06? Vote was close there, wasn't it?

I think you can figure out the answer.

Be part of the solution, or get the hell out of the way.

The ones who are partisan and politically motivated here are the Republicans smearing Brunner.

Anyone who knows anything about Ohio politics knows that the GOP's smears of Brunner are entirely motivated by their fears about 2011 redistricting. Right now Ohio's district lines are undisputeably gerrymandered to Republican advantage. The SoS is a member of the apportionment board, and the way the chips are falling right now for the GOP, replacing Brunner with a Republican in 2010 is their only hope of maintaining control of the board and thus continuing to gerrymander the districts - and thus maintain republican power in Ohio. I won't claim that Dems have never been guilty of the same in Ohio and other states across the nation, as gerrymandering is almost as old as our country, but I do urge everyone to consider this reality check any time you hear the GOP criticize Brunner.

Re: "In every case, courts said she was simply wrong. "   Where are you getting that? Jennifer Brunner won all but one of the frivolous lawsuits the Ohio GOP filed against her. The GOP's strategy was "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks," and very little of it did.

The GOP's other strategy: repeat a lie over and over enough times and dittoheads will start to believe it's true. The idea that Jennifer Brunner ran a partisan election is absolutely preposterous. If you want the ultimate example of a partisan Ohio Secretary of State, look no further than her predecessor, Republican Ken Blackwell. Jennifer Brunner ran a fair, clean, transparent election. Anyone who was on the ground in Ohio in 2004 and 2008 and therefore able to compare and contrast would attest to this fact.

On the absentee application checkbox issue - get the facts. Brunner did NOT try to "throw out all the McCain absentee ballot applications." She wanted to revisit the ones with legal ambiguity (unchecked boxes) and send those people a notice and a proper absentee ballot application.

When an organization chooses to include a checkbox on their form with something like "I affirm that I am a qualified elector," and a voter chooses to NOT check that box, it creates legal ambiguity. It's dangerous territory for anyone (i.e. SoS or BoE personnel) to just say "Oh, I'm sure the voter meant to check that box."   Back in the days of Ken Blackwell, a similar checkbox existed on the official voter registration forms, and if it wasn't checked, that registration form was considered invalid. It's interesting that of all the things we (voting rights advocates) criticized Blackwell about, his invalidating such reg forms was not one of them. We understood that as long as that box was there, to not check the box implied that the voter was stating that he or she was NOT a qualified elector. We felt that the existence of the box was silly, sure, but as long as that box was there we just trained our registrars to always make sure the voter checked that box if they did in fact intend to register to vote. We didn't expect the SoS to make guesses about voter intention.

Those wishing for a reality check about Brunner's position on this case should see Brunner's statement here:

http://www.sos.state.oh.us/SOS/PressReleases/2008%20Press%20Releases/2008-09-17.aspx

Re: Brunner "violated federal law by sepcifically directing Ohio to turn off validity checks on registration" - what are you talking about? Voter registration under Brunner went through the same checks it has for a very long time - checks against the BMV and the Social Security Administration. That is what produced the 200,000 cases of discrepancies (i.e. when someone was listed as "John" with the BMV but "Jon" on their voter registration), remember? Or maybe you missed those front-page headlines.

What Brunner did do was refuse to release the information on those 200,000 voters to the Republican party (a private organization, I might remind you) and the county boards (there are 88 county boards in Ohio, with extremely varied levels of competence, SECURITY, and technology) - thus saving those voters from being subjected to local vigilanteism and uneven application of the law from county to county. Brunner followed the law - which states that such record checks must be performed, but does not specify what is to be done with the information when discrepancies are found. Not only did Brunner follow the law here, but also this did not favor one party over another.

From Brunner's statement on this frivolous lawsuit:

“This database was never intended to be a litmus test for an Ohioans’ right to vote.  If it were, Joe the Plumber and Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted – who are both technically ‘mismatches’ in this database – would have to use provisional ballots on Election Day.  Ohio’s bipartisan elections officials have multi-layered systems to catch voter registration fraud and prevent illegal voting."

Lastly, this right-wing obsession with ACORN is laughable. The idea that ACORN is this all-powerful organization pulling the strings of presidential candidates and secretaries of state is paranoid hallucination, trust me.

Why is the GOP not targeting Secretary of State positions and actively opposing ACORN's candidates? It seems somewhat important when it comes down to it, no?

Thank you, Ohio Voter, I have totally accepted Brunner's statement in defense of her conduct. Phew! I thought something funny was going on!

He is the stereotypical corrupt politician... spouts his party line while lining his pockets behind the voters' backs. If he wins the recount, expect more GOP tarnishing while the tawdry details of his corruption makes the news all the way until the 2010 election.

Franken is very liberal, but at least he is authentic. The controversies surrounding him typically revolved around his proclivity to speak his opinion in his pre-political days... hardly a damning indictment of anyone.