How bad? 'I thought I was going to throw up,' Jennifer Brunner recalls.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner will be under the national spotlight next month, overseeing what's expected to be the state's largest-ever turnout for a presidential election. It will also be her first as the state's chief election official.

The stakes will be just as high as they were for her Republican predecessor, J. Kenneth Blackwell, four years ago, when the narrowly decided state election was marred by charges of questionable results and complaints that some residents, largely in minority areas, were forced to wait hours to cast their votes.

This year, denizens of the Buckeye State who mistrust touch-screen systems will be allowed to vote on a paper ballot if they prefer. The directive to allow "paper or plastic" came in the wake of Brunner's landmark 2007 "Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing" analysis, otherwise known as EVEREST, in which "critical security failures" were found in every system tested by several teams of both corporate and academic computer scientists and security experts.

Ohio officials discovered in March that some voting systems manufactured by Premier Elections Solutions Inc., a subsidiary of Diebold Inc., dropped votes as they were being uploaded to a main server. Because the problem is in the tabulator system, it affects votes cast on both Diebold's direct recording electronic (DRE) systems, which are usually touch screen, and paper ballot optical-scan systems. The same central tabulators will be used in more than 30 states next month.

Unfortunately, correcting the problem is not as easy as simply applying a patch to work around the problem. Voting systems, at least at the federal level, must be certified as an entire end-to-end unit. In order to receive a certification "stamp of approval" from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), companies must submit every piece of hardware and software to be used -- such as optical-scan devices, "paper trail" printers and central tabulators -- as a single unit so that tests can determine whether they all work together without conflict.

Critics have long complained that testing at the federal level has been lax and secretive. Recently, the EAC revamped its certification process, but it has yet to approve any of the systems currently submitted by vendors. Therefore, systems criticized as insecure in the EVEREST study will once again be in use this November.

Brad Friedman, publisher of The Brad Blog, recently sat down with Brunner to discuss the many challenges she has faced since taking office as Ohio's first Democratic secretary of state in 16 years. Those challenges range from the delicate task of encouraging county election administrators to move to more secure and verifiable voting systems to addressing concerns about how to best ensure that votes will be counted accurately in the upcoming election. The following are edited excerpts from that conversation.

I think other election officials around the country are now realizing, thanks to you and [California Secretary of State Deborah Bowen] coming up with these tests, that it's not just crazy bloggers who are concerned about this stuff.

Oh no, no. When I finally saw the results of our [EVEREST] tests, I thought I was going to throw up.

I didn't think it would be that bad. And it was -- it was awful. I looked at it on a Saturday morning, and that night I went to bed and woke up [just before 4:00 on] Sunday morning going, "Oh my God." I never wake up on the weekends -- trust me.

You know, I've been pushing against the tide, but when Premier [Elections Solutions] sent that letter out [admitting that their tabulators drop votes], it's like vindication.

Tell me how that admission came about.

[Premier] really didn't know what was causing the votes to be dropped. And they sent the equipment in this situation to a lab in Canada, and what they came back with was that it could be an interaction with the McAfee antivirus software. So they put out that first nationwide advisory, but then their advice was to disable the software when you're uploading the memory cards. That gave me the chills.

Butler County [where the problem was first discovered] brought their machines to Columbus, and we had already contacted McAfee and said, "Do you think this is possible for there to be these kinds of interactions?" We told them we were going to do more testing. McAfee told us what kind of testing we should be doing, and we were performing the testing over a two-day period. It was [still] dropping the votes with the software disabled.

So we already knew that it was dropping votes [even] with the McAfee software disabled. We already knew it was in the Premier software, but I'm just very surprised with there being pending litigation that they just came out and said, "Yes, it is a problem, and we're responsible for it. It's an error in the code."

If they're going to use McAfee on those systems, did it occur to you or to them that those aren't certified for use with McAfee? Under the federal certification standards, they have to approve all of that software together. So, in truth, for federal certification to be legitimate with McAfee on there, they have to test it with that on there.

It was tested in Ohio with it on there. Which is why, according to my discussions with Premier, it was certified with the McAfee on there.

It was?

We heard two different stories. We heard that it was on the server when it was sent to Ohio to be tested and certified, and then we heard that the [former Secretary of State] Blackwell people wanted it on there and specified McAfee, so we're not really sure. But it was tested and certified in Ohio with the McAfee software.

Under Blackwell?

Under Blackwell, yeah.

They've got a more stringent testing process now, at the EAC [U.S. Election Assistance Commission], supposedly.

Very cumbersome, yes.

Cumbersome?

Do you realize it's end-to-end testing? So let's say we wanted to make available the high-speed optical scanner, for absentee ballots, from Premier. You can't just test that. And you can't just get that. It's got to be their server, their software, their DRE [touch-screen system], their precinct-based scanner, their high-speed scanner -- and once all of that is approved, then it's allowed to go into the state market.

One way to look at [the EAC's new testing regime] is "cumbersome," another way to look at it is "thorough" -- knowing that previous systems have, you know, slipped through [its previous certification process]. And look at the mess we're in.

Right, right. And what's interesting: Do you know that the EAC put out an RFP [request for proposals] for an EVEREST-like study at the federal level?

Most people haven't read EVEREST. They just really don't get how bad it is. Are we looking at a situation -- if not now, then maybe down the road -- when we say, "You know what? All of these computers are causing us more trouble than they are ultimately worth." That maybe we ought to just take a piece of paper, put in a check mark, put it in a clear box and count it at the precinct the way many other countries do. Even states in the U.S. still do it. Just count the ballots at the polls before they move and be done with it.

Part of the problem is public expectation, the expectation of the media. They just think we should have the elements to do these results [quickly].

But we do, in places like, for example, New Hampshire. Twenty percent of the precincts up there count by hand. If we're talking about [counting] at the precincts, there's not all that many ballots per precinct. It could be counted in an hour or two.

[Maybe], if you think about one race. But if you are talking about multiple races, and in Ohio we have four ballots -- we have presidential, partisan, the nonpartisan, and the issues ballot....

Our boards of elections have a directive on how to hand count the ballots if they have a need to, but it is a longer process than one would think. And with our poll workers working 13, 14 hours, we'd have to have extra people to come in as counters....

Yes, bring another shift in. Well, you say it's a longer process. Do we actually know that, or do we think that it is? We can say, "Forget this hand-counting stuff; it'll never work." Or say, "You know what? All these problems we're having, maybe we ought to at least explore, see if there is another way." Because I don't see this nightmare ending, frankly, with these machines.

[Hand counting] may be worth it to try as a pilot [program]. I'm not so sure I'd want to experiment during the presidential elections.

I understand that. But literally, four or five precincts, not counties.

With the diversity that we have in Ohio, you may have a board of elections that would be willing to try it, because you have a wide variety of viewpoints among the election officials.

You've got friends in Cuyahoga County, I understand. You could try it there.

It may be worth doing, especially Cuyahoga County. They have so many elections because of all the different municipalities. And then I think we would have a little bit more data to deal with rather than supposition or anecdotes.... We say, "Let's try it and see." You know, after the November election.

What's the next election following November?

There's a special in February, and then there's the May primary next year. This would be for municipal elections, which would make more sense -- a smaller election, a safer environment, to try it in, [when] we're not hit by such large turnout.

It also might offer a good message to the voting machine companies, who I think pretty much feel, "Hey, you may hate us, but what else are you going to do? Where else are you going to go?" And it might send a message saying, "You know what? There may be other ways. You guys might not be the only game in town."

It wouldn't be willy-nilly, but it would be where we maybe set up a control, some control precincts and then these precincts, and we run processes and we see.

Yes.

So it would be worth trying as a pilot next year.

Brad Friedman is an investigative journalist/blogger and the creator/publisher of The Brad Blog, which focuses on issues involving election integrity. He and his work are currently highlighted in a number of documentaries now in release around the country, including David Earnhardt's Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections and the just-released Murder, Spies & Voting Lies: The Clint Curtis Story, by documentarian Patty Sharaf. Another interview with Brunner discussing related issues is posted on AlterNet.