OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: The Ohio Legislative Correspondents Association Thursday declined to comment further on the important points raised in letter of rebuttal from the OhioNews Bureau of ePluribus Media to the insider group's rejection of three of our seasoned journalists to become credentialed, voting members of the Ohio Statehouse press corps.

Our media release on this important but under the radar issue is posted below the fold.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: After nearly four months of engaging the Ohio Legislative Correspondents Association (OLCA) to review and rule on a request by ePluribus Media to secure Statehouse press corps credentials for three of its journalists, a rejection of those candidates was received Tuesday citing "the appearance of political bias and a lack of adherence to professional journalism standards as referenced in the OLCA constitution," as reasons arrived at by the group’s board of officers.

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 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.

In a fortnight after Ohio’s new Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner released her much-awaited – and now much criticized – review of Ohio’s system of voting that detailed a stunning array of voting-machine vulnerabilities , and less than a week following her tie-breaking vote to force the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (CCBOE) to scrap its $21 million Diebold-made touch-screen machines in favor of optical scanners made by another vendor, teams are forming to challenge the wisdom and efficacy of Brunner’s rush to reform voting.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: The best Republican Supreme Court money can buy delivered another blow to Ohioans Thursday, when it upheld as constitutional a punitive bill rammed through a strongly led Republican General Assembly in 2004 that arbitrarily imposed low limits on damages in personal injury lawsuits.

Two dissenting judges said the ill-considered ruling substituted the judgment of the legislature for the judgment by a jury, and upholds the prerogative of the legislature, through its power to cap noneconomic damages, to effectively eliminate them.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner broke a 2-2 tie vote between Republicans and Democrats on the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (CCBOE) over whether to stick with its $21 million dollar touch-screen voting system or spend millions more to switch to optical scanners in preparation for next year’s presidential race, which will kickoff with Ohio’s primary on March 4th now less than 75 days away.

Brunner’s decision, which came one week after she announced the findings of her $1.8 million federally funded study on the state’s voting system that revealed the numerous vulnerabilities it posed, will mean Cuyahoga County, Ohio’s most populous county and the scene of previous Election Day train wrecks, has little room for error as it prepares to replace one machine with another, counting votes in a central location instead of in individual precincts and training poll workers for the task ahead.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: Like many Ohio workers who have lost their jobs over the last decade, Ohio’s fund for jobless workers may itself become unemployed come next spring if expenditures to the jobless continue to outpace employer contributions.

In a story in The Columbus Dispatch (TCD) Thursday calling attention to how close Ohio’s Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund is to hitting bottom, jobs losses, rising energy prices and problems in the housing market, among others, are so worrisome to new Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland that he’s looking for outside help to figure out how to keep it above water.

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.

This week, after the scrutiny of the report by a wide range of people, from political foes to voter-rights activists to independent election experts, Brunner begrudgingly dropped a preliminary price tag to make Ohio’s election system ship-shape before next year’s presidential election at the latest and the Buckeye primary on March 4th at the earliest.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, responding to the findings in a report released last Friday that confirmed serious vulnerabilities exist with Ohio’s pervasive and costly system of electronic voting, said he hopes changes can be made before next year’s race for the White House so it doesn’t turn out to be as flawed and open to criticism as were the two previous elections.

OhioNews Bureau: UPDATAED

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.

Among her top recommendations were ditching the state's direct-recording-electronic (DRE) machines, moving to a 100 percent central-count optical scan system, eliminating individual precincts in favor of vote centers and the adoption of early voting.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: Supporters of a comprehensive federal energy bill, known as H.R.6, took Ohio’s senior senator, George V. Voinovich, to task for his vote Thursday that helped defeat the current version that included, among other purposes, increases the production of clean renewable fuels.

Meanwhile, in far away Bali, an Indonesian island where a United Nation’s conference on global warming is taking place, Al Gore, a former US Vice President and recent winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work on global warming, told attendees that hope for greater, more enlightened US participation in reaching agreement on a "roadmap" for a future deal to reduce greenhouse gases is on the way in 2008 when America elects a new president.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: In a published report today citing growing disparities between state revenues and expenditures, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, the new captain of the ship of state that has drifted off course over 16 years of Republican rule and can’t seem to fix on a solid compass heading leading to smoother seas and brighter skies, has ordered his office of budget and management to slow the engines and stand ready to man the bilge pumps if economic waters roil more than they are now.

An Op-Editude

Aliens, Go Home. We can destroy ourselves, thank you.

Al Gore’s real and riveting message about global warming may seem alien to many, especially the world’s behemoth energy producers who envision their day of reckoning if they obey his admonitions and follow his teachings. And to political knuckleheads like President Bush, who steadfastly refuse to watch his award-winning call-to-arms film for reasons that defy logic and who, like a befuddled ship’s captain afraid to change course for fear his crew would criticize him for setting bad compass headings to begin with, prefers the pride of self-righteousness as he and his Panglossian world view down with the ship.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: An Ohio common pleas court judge issued a ruling Monday that may stop banks and other lenders who can’t prove they're the owner of a mortgage from pursuing a home foreclosure lawsuit. The ruling from Hamilton County in southwest Ohio not only tosses a legal life jacket to many floating in the rising sea of mortgage defaults, but it could further inflate into an legal battleship of sorts that Ohio’s rambunctious and controversial new Democratic Attorney General can deploy in confronting a housing crisis that puts the Buckeye State first in the nation in the percentage of home foreclosures.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: When early pioneers floated downstream on the Niagara River, they saw the billowing streams of rising mists from the monstrous falls that lay ahead of them. For the boatmen who failed to heed the clear message of the mists, their future was indeed bleak. For the smart ones who understood the peril of the mists, they had time to portage around the death-defying waterfalls further downstream.

The mighty mists of Ohio’s election system have already been spotted. They rose on Election Day through a foreboding combination of machine and server malfunctions and poor poll-worker performance. This cocktail of concern was seen in several counties, most notably in Cuyahoga, the scene of previous Election Day train wrecks, which again experienced troubling system and machine malfunctions, and in Putnam, a small county where a special congressional primary election was being held.  

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.

OhioNews Bureau

ONB COLUMBUS: With absentee voting set to begin in New Hampshire in about a month, it seemed the right time for the Election Law @ Moritz (EL@M) group at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law to release its year-long comprehensive study of the election administration systems in five key Midwestern states.

The question the study asked was how well election systems are working in five key Midwestern states including Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ohio and can they withstand the pressures election forecasters say will come in 2008 when voter turnout is expected to be as high if not higher than it was in 2004, the last presidential election

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 it 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.

With big systems like schools, taxes and health care in need of big fixes that for reasons of partisan politics and budget constraints are not likely to emerge anytime soon, can the Buckeye State’s current crop of political leaders steer the ship of state around the economic and social reefs that have taken their toll on the great state in the last two decades?

ePluribus Media OhioNews Bureau
STORY UPDATE

ONB COLUMBUS: Come Monday when Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner appears before a legislative panel to ask for their approval to receive funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts for an innovative effort to help residents who move keep their voter registration up to date, she should expect an unwelcome reception from one Republican member of the panel who has already expressed his concern with the limited scope of the initiative and with one of the project’s vendors.