OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: Just when you thought the confab and controversy over Ohio’s problem-plagued system of voting was over, a new stew is brewing pitting election-law experts and voting-rights advocates against Ohio’s new chief elections officer, who recently decided to scrap expensive, hackable touch-screen machines in favor of expensive, temperamental optical scanners in the hotspot of Ohio election failures just a few short months before the Buckeye State’s March primary.

OhioNews Bureau

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: Last Friday Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner presented the controversial findings of her $1.8 million dollar EVEREST study of Ohio’s election system showing vulnerabilities abound.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: With $100 million in federal Help America Vote Funds having been spent already to purchase thousands of electronic voting machines used in Ohio’s 88 counties, the $1.9 million more in federal funds just spent by Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner to perform a comprehensive review of voting systems used in the state seems only to have further muddied the waters of what to do for the 2008 March primaries and the fall general elections, when a massive turnout is expected for the race for the White House.

ePluribus Media OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: An Ohio common pleas court judge struck down a Republican-pushed campaign finance bill Thursday because the wrong version of the legislation was signed by former Gov. Bob Taft and then filed with the secretary of State, making it the law of the land.

The controversial campaign finance bill was rammed through a lame-duck session of the legislature in 2006 by the GOP, which at the time enjoyed veto-proof margins in both chambers of the legislature and had a Republican governor willing to sign the bill.

ePluribus Media OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: When the respective chairmen of Ohio’s political delegations rise in 2008 at the presidential nominating conventions in Denver or Minneapolis and announce that the “great state of Ohio gives its 20 Electoral College votes to the next president of the United States…,” the great state they are referring to is considerably less great than it once was.

ePluribus Media Ohio News Bureau

ONB Columbus: It’s unfortunate that Ohio had to wait until the November general elections were over before winning a poll-worker training grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts (PCT). The grant initiative will fund an online training program for poll workers and state and local-election officials that will hopefully make them more competent and capable in their jobs on Election Day.