NRO's Stephen Spruiell caught up with Ken Blackwell on the lastest from the most partisan secreatry of state in Ohio history:
"I’ve been fighting yesterday’s wars, with John Conyers threatening to subpoena me to come to Washington and talk about 2004, when we had a million new registrations and a record participation of African-Americans," Blackwell says. "And yet right under their noses there’s an effort to change the voting system to one where Columbus is trying to call the shots. It’s a throwback to political boss-ism like I’ve never seen before."
Blackwell says that the centralization of decision-making is more troubling than the rejection of machine technology. "We prided ourselves on our checks and balances," he says, "where 88 county boards of elections, each with three Republicans and three Democrats, made the calls on types of machines and the distribution of those machines. Now [Brunner] is trying to make that call from Columbus. That’s very frightening.
"Look, I told the 88 county boards of elections that I would offer them optical-scan ballots [a type of paper ballot similar to an SAT-style answer sheet and preferred over punchcard ballots]," Blackwell says. "I gave them a menu of verifed and validated systems, and they chose."
"There’s no perfect technology," he says. "It’s disquieting, not that she’s advocating for an optical-scan system, but that she is making those calls from Columbus."
Read the whole thing
here.
