My piece on the homepage today details a controversy that’s developing in the state of Ohio over voting machines. The new Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, apparently shares the left-wing paranoia about voting machines that led some to believe that Diebold rigged the 2004 election in Ohio for Bush and Cheney. Former Cincinnati mayor Ken Blackwell, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2006, was the Ohio secretary of state in 2004, and he has had to put up with all kinds of nonsense over his role in that election. I spoke with him today about his successor’s plan to move the state back to paper ballots.

“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.”