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The Toledo Blade Endorses Jennifer!
Brunner For Secretary of State
The Toledo Blade
October 26, 2006
The Nov. 7 election gives Ohio voters the opportunity to return the Secretary of State's office to the purpose for which it exists: conducting fair elections free of the partisan shenanigans that have become common during the reign of Ken Blackwell. This vital change can best be carried out with the election of Jennifer Brunner, a former judge who has more than two decades of experience with election law and the proper conduct of elections. Ms. Brunner, a Columbus Democrat, can best be counted upon to administer elections in an evenhanded manner and resist partisan pressure to gerrymander legislative districts as a member of the state apportionment board. The same cannot be said for her Republican opponent, Greg Hartmann, the clerk of courts in Hamilton County, whose only association with elections is in the same hotly partisan cauldron of Cincinnati that produced Mr. Blackwell, now the GOP candidate for governor. Ms. Brunner knows elections. She served as elections counsel in the Secretary of State's office in an earlier administration and later had a private legal practice concentrating on election matters. Having served as a judge in Franklin County Common Pleas Court for five years, Ms. Brunner also has what Mr. Hartmann sorely lacks: an air of maturity and the sense of impartiality necessary to ride close herd on the 88 county boards that run the state elections apparatus on a day-to-day basis. Before Ken Blackwell took over as Secretary of State in 1999, Ohio had a national reputation for fair elections. Eight years later, that reputation is in shambles. Immediately after the deadlocked 2000 presidential election, Mr. Blackwell hopped a plane to Florida to help Republican operatives steamroller George W. Bush into the White House. In 2004, he was the avowedly partisan chairman of the Bush re-election effort in Ohio, while issuing a stream of election rulings that had the thinly disguised aim of suppressing the vote among the poor and disadvantaged. At the same time, Mr. Blackwell was startlingly lackadaisical in purging files on the business side of his office that easily could be used in identity theft. Mr. Hartmann had the same problem in his Hamilton County office. In contrast, Ms. Brunner seems less interested in partisan advantage and more dedicated to sensible policies: careful but expansive rules for voter registration, and voting procedures not complicated for ordinary people by cumbersome and unnecessary identification requirements. Contrary to claims by Mr. Hartmann, registration irregularities and voting fraud are not and never have been serious problems in Ohio. The overblown allegations floated by Republicans have been used to justify more restrictive policies that work to GOP advantage. Ohio's election system desperately needs a return to the balance and evenhanded administration that was notable in the pre-Blackwell era. We believe this necessary reform can best be accomplished by electing Jennifer Brunner as Secretary of State.
