Based on concerns expressed by Gov. Ted Strickland and others, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is re-examining a proposal to enable Ohio to test and approve new voting systems that have not been federally certified.

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The state Board of Voting Machine Examiners voted 2-1 last week to pursue a plan to change an Ohio rule requiring that any voting device approved for use in the state also must have federal certification.

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[Brunner’s] plan would require an executive order from Strickland to change the rule and waive the need for federal certification. The governor said yesterday that although Brunner has assured him that any state standards and testing would exceed the federal ones, he’s worried about public perception.

“I think if I were to take an action that may imply that we were in some way weakening the certification requirements, that that could be problematic,”Strickland said.

Critics of the plan also doubt the state’s ability to develop adequate standards for accuracy and security so quickly, and say it would be risky to rush new equipment into use, especially in Ohio in a presidential election year.

Jonathan Lykes is a poet, activist, caregiver, scholar, singer and self-described “shifter and changer of things.”

What’s next? The lean, 17-year-old Shaw High School student quietly stares into the possible future for a moment, then grins and says, “I’d like to make a difference.”

He says it might be as an attorney. Jonathan recently learned he’s getting a full ride — including a $5,000 American Civil Liberties Union Student Youth Activist Award scholarship — when he starts at the University of Chicago in the fall to study history and political science.

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He traded the Atlanta suburbs for an urban environment of violence and drugs. “I don’t fear it,” he says, then adds, smiling, “I’ve gotten a lot of good poems out of it.”

His easygoing nature is balanced by the dedication of a youth who shuns smoking, drinking and even dating — at least until college — in pursuit of a goal.

The price is pressure. “You can’t do anything wrong because you’re Jonathan Lykes,” he says. “Sometimes you just want to be a teen,” says the young man who addressed state legislators last year regarding African-American males and graduation rates.

“The court is now making arguments for the plaintiff and that is not the court’s role,” said assistant county prosecutor Tony Cillo, complaining that he could not prepare for arguments that the ACLU had not raised.

“You’re supposed to know all of [the arguments],” Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge said.

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Burge raised the issue of whether the words “quickly and painlessly cause death” in the statue should be applied not only to the dosage of the lethal injection drugs, but to how they are administered.

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“Things can go wrong, and when things go wrong there is at least the possibility that lethal injection will not be free of extraordinary pain,”Gamso said.

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Burge’s decision could determine the fate of the state’s process for executing condemned inmates, although his ruling will likely be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

“What they did was dead wrong and in violation of Ohio law,” said Chris Link, Executive Director of the ACLU of Ohio.

The ACLU sent a letter to Bucyrus City Schools Superintendent Dr. Todd Nichols late on Monday evening.

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“According to reports from the media and others, the students were detained and subjected to body searches after some of the students were seen smoking on or near school grounds. Rather than lesser search techniques, such as sniffing the students’ breath, having them turn out their pockets or patting them down, the school personnel reportedly ordered the students to life their shirts and pull their pants down revealing their underwear, at which point the school personnel ran their fingers inside the waistband of the students’ underwear,” reads part of the letter written by ACLU Legal Director Jeffrey M. Gamso.

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“That portion of the Revised Code goes on to prohibit strip searches except in the narrowest of circumstances. It further says that performing an unauthorized strip search is a first-degree misdemeanor and the person illegally searched may sue for damages,” Gamso says in the letter.

The searches were conducted on the students by Bucyrus Middle School Principal Todd Roll and Assistant Principal Mark Burke.

The ACLU does not think the searches were reasonable in proportion to the circumstances.

“Smoking cigarettes may be prohibited by school policy, but it does not justify the most extreme search-stripping a child-that should never be used except for perhaps, life-threatening emergencies,” Gamso writes in his letter.

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“There was a similar situation in southern Ohio where students were strip searched. The Ohio Department of Education launched their own investigation, which they may do in this case,” Link said.

In that case, the ACLU represented the parents of the students who were stripped and the lawsuit was settled out of court.

“In this case, we will proceed based on what the families involved want to do,” Link said.

Link and her staff requests that parents of the children involved in the search contact them at 216-472-2200.

Ohio counties would be ill-advised to buy new voting equipment before it’s federally certified. Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, the first Democrat in that office in 16 years, wants a change in law to allow purchasing equipment not yet certified by federal officials. Gov. Ted Strickland and the General Assembly should resist that.

Brunner says the newest and best types of precinct-based optical scanners have yet to be federally certified.

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A problem for optical-scan systems in three counties doesn’t justify a rush to abandon federal certification of election machines.

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Even if switching the entire state to optical-scan voting were a good idea, rushing to do so would not be wise.

If Brunner were to be successful in pushing this latest proposal through, and if the new machines failed to work as advertised in the November election, she would rue the day she abandoned federal certification.

Representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and the state’s Latino Affairs Commission urged lawmakers to quash legislation that would require public agencies to conduct business and keep records in English. The bill, they said, is unnecessary, threatens civil and human rights of non-English-speaking citizens and would deter residents from learning other languages.

“The denial of services to American citizens with limited English proficiency is already happening,” said Ezra C. Escudero, director of the Ohio Latino Affairs Commission, which advises the governor and lawmakers on issues facing Hispanic residents.

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“The threat of costly litigation, denial of rights and services and the threat of limiting economic opportunities for our state are all quantifiable,” Escudero said. “The benefit of HB 477 is not quantifiable because it simply does not exist.”

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Carrie Davis, staff attorney for the ACLU of Ohio, said the legislation was “ill-conceived, will lead to costly litigation and will hurt Ohio’s ability to attract innovative companies and good jobs … English is not under attack.”

In doing so, the majority gives little weight to the actual evidence

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The far better policy course would be to err on the side of keeping elections as open and accessible as possible. That would reverse the burden of proof, placing the onus on those who favor voter ID to first produce evidence of systematic fraud. What’s been uncovered so far in investigations is voter confusion. An analysis conducted by the New York Times found that an aggressive five-year effort by the U.S. Department of Justice to root out voter fraud produced just five convictions.

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The more legitimate fear is that the poor, elderly and disabled will be intimidated by voter identification requirements, even those that don’t require a government-issued photo ID. Anything that creates an additional obstacle before voting should be undertaken - if convincing evidence shows current protections aren’t working. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court failed to apply such a standard. It opted unwisely for narrowing, if slightly, the door to vote.

Trumbull County officials, therefore, should immediately reject Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner’s notion that counties should have the option of conducting elections solely through mail-in ballots. She wants state legislators to consider action that would allow counties to seek voter approval of such a mechanism. Under the plan, if a county’s voters approve, ballots would be submitted only by mail - there would be no polling places open on election day.

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Elections officials admit there is an increased chance of fraud when ballots are simply filled out, then dropped in the mail. But they say that no system of voting is entirely secure against fraud.

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Making it easier for voters to participate in the election process is not a good idea if it also makes it easier for dishonest politicians to commit vote fraud. And Trumbull has certainly seen its share of dishonest politicians and political fraud. Legislators should be extremely wary of Brunner’s proposal. First and foremost, elections in Ohio need to be fair and honest.

With so many effective disciplinary methods at the disposal of educators, there is simply no compelling reason to continue to use corporal punishment. Luckily, there is House Bill 406, a bipartisan bill pending in the Ohio General Assembly, that would prohibit spanking in schools.

Students should feel safe and protected at school, but there is very little reason for them to feel so. Inmates in prison cannot receive corporal punishment, and yet children in schools may. Children are protected from severe corporal punishment from their parents, yet they are not afforded the same rights in schools.

Locking up all drug users and throwing away the keys eventually was going to cost more than Ohioans would be willing to pay. That day has come for most in the Ohio House of Representatives. The Ohio Senate and Gov. Ted Strickland should follow the responsible lead of the House.

By an 89-6 vote - with four of this region’s six representatives in the majority - the House on April 15 voted to give judges greater flexibility in sentencing nonviolent, low-level criminals. Judges already have that ability with nonviolent drug offenders, The Columbus Dispatch reported, but House Bill 130 would allow them to also send to treatment rather than prison people who committed low-level, nonviolent crimes if their actions were influenced by drugs or alcohol. Judges still would retain the ability to impose prison sentences.

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This bill should become law. Credit Reps. Matt Huffman, Tony Core, Cliff Hite and Jim Zehringer for helping the House pass it.

For the first time since Ohio resumed executions in 1999, a woman is among 27 Death Row inmates whose legal options are closing.

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She could become the first woman executed since Betty Butler from Hamilton County on June 11, 1954.

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Public Defender Tim Young said August is the earliest he envisions another execution. The last person executed in the state was Christopher J. Newton on May 24, 2007.

Young said the cases being reviewed are at various stages of the lengthy appeals process. Some are nearing the end of several rounds of legal challenges, while others are not nearly as close.

The public defender estimated that about 17 cases are in the first tier, meaning their appeal process is limited, but not yet over.

The law was supposed to take effect in 2004, but it has been tied up in federal court for four years and has never been enforced.

Lawyers for Attorney General Marc Dann asked the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday to overturn a lower court order that found the law was vague and, therefore, unconstitutional.

Planned Parenthood, which sued to block enforcement of the law, contends the law is so confusing and unclear that doctors could face criminal charges for acts they did not know were illegal.

Lilly Ledbetter worked from 1979 until 1998 at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. in Gadsden, Ala., and was paid less than male workers. After finally finding out about it, she sued as a victim of gender discrimination and justice seemed to be done.

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Justice was undone when the company appealed and a federal appeals court overturned the award and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. Ms. Ledbetter, deserving and sympathetic plaintiff, found out why she could not prevail:
She did not have extra-sensory perception, she could not read minds, and she did not have the x-ray vision necessary to pierce closed doors and see that her male colleagues were being paid more than she was.

That’s what it amounts to anyway. The coldly legalistic reason was that the law said she had to file a claim within 180 days of an act of discrimination, which in her case had started many years before with cumulative effect.

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Last July, the House of Representatives passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, HR 2831, which would correct the alleged defect in the law the justices identified. This week, it is likely to be considered by the Senate.

What was - and wasn’t - at stake is best illustrated by an opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens. He said that he has concluded that the death penalty itself is unconstitutional. But he said that if the death penalty is acceptable, then the Kentucky system is acceptable.

He didn’t take the case as a vote on the death penalty itself. That was a good decision. The merits of the death penalty should be addressed through direct questions about its constitutionality, morality and usefulness, not through the back door.

Some people think a back-door effort - challenging each mode of execution, one by one - is respectable because it reveals a central truth: killing somebody forcibly is an ugly process, inevitably. There’s no good way.

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There have, of course, been botched executions in Ohio and elsewhere.

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The case for the death penalty itself is undermined by a lot of factors, some being fairly new: the realization, via DNA technology, that some death row inmates are innocent; the growing use of no-parole sentences, thus somewhat assuaging the public’s concern about killers being let back out on the streets; the growing understanding that most other democracies are functioning without the death penalty and without seeing their crime rates soar; and the fact that the death penalty is being applied inconsistently.

The federal government has announced that it will expand its current practice of collecting DNA samples from people convicted of federal crimes and begin collecting them from all people arrested in connection with a federal crime along with many immigrants detained by federal authorities.

This practice is expected to add genetic identifiers from about 1 million people a year to the rapidly growing federal law enforcement DNA database, which now has about 5.9 million people in it.

Thirteen states - Ohio is not among them - already collect or are planning to collect DNA samples from everybody arrested, including people never prosecuted, for whom charges are later dropped, and those acquitted. These states routinely forward the data to the national database.

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The preliminary federal rules call for eliminating people never convicted, but only if they petition for expungement. It would be better if expungement were automatic.

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In addition, DNA has information about genetic characteristics, susceptibility to disease and the like. Current FBI rules preclude using samples to study genetic traits, but those rules could be changed or broken. It might be wise to retain only those alleles necessary for identification and destroy the rest, along with the actual sample.