Dennis Willard: Christopher-Brunner debate a case of ‘he said, she said'

COLUMBUS — At first, it sounded crazy.

Steve Christopher, a candidate hoping to run in the Republican primary for Ohio attorney general, claimed Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner shortchanged him in the petition-counting process and wrongly and prematurely disqualified him from the May ballot.

Christopher said he turned in more than 2,000 signatures on Feb. 18 at Brunner’s office, and learned a week later that the secretary of state was reporting he submitted only 788 signatures.

Brunner is not claiming she lost the signatures or even that her dog ate them.

Her office maintains Christopher gave it only 788 total signatures when he needed 1,000 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.

The secretary of state scanned and time-stamped the petitions, used a trademark process known as Batestamping to keep them in order chronologically and then segregated the petitions by county to be sent out to local boards of election to validate the signatures to ensure these were real, live, breathing citizens eligible to vote.

Jeff Ortega, a spokesman for Brunner, said the office does not count or check the signatures because that responsibility falls on the local boards.

“Nothing was lost. Nothing was misplaced. Everything was handled according to a proper chain of custody and we can prove it,” Ortega said.

He said an employee asked Christopher how many signatures were collected and, after hesitating, Christopher said “2,750” and that was the number written down.

Ortega said the 788 total signatures were sent out to be checked and the local election boards reported back to Brunner that Christopher had collected 638 valid signatures and 166 invalid signatures.

Ahem, that’s 804 total signatures. Ortega said he would check on those figures and he responded via e-mail.

Ortega emphasized the focus is on valid signatures.

“Those numbers were double-checked by our office. The number of valid signatures is what is reflected in the letter notifying candidates whether they are or are not on the ballot,” he wrote.

But the numbers don’t add up.

“There may be some discrepancies in some of the numbers sent to us by the counties, but these are minor calculating errors that will be addressed via amended work sheets that counties will submit in the near future,” Ortega wrote.

He noted that “Medina County reported 96 valid signatures, 18 invalid, adding up to 104. It should have been 96 valid, 8 invalid, which does add up to 104. One other county, Hardin, reported 101 valid, 6 invalid, but added it up as 101. Of course, it should have been 107.”

Of course. Why didn’t I see that in the first place?

“Again, these are minor discrepancies that do not affect the number of valid signatures,” Ortega wrote.

Mark Lucas, a Christopher campaign spokesman, relates a different story.

He said Christopher had more than 2,000 signatures and picked up more on his way that day to Brunner’s office. When the employee asked Christopher for a number, the would-be candidate said he wasn’t sure because there were at least 2,000, plus whatever he picked up on the way to the office.

The employee then went into a small room, came out and wrote down the figure 2,750, according to Christopher.

We have a classic “he said, she said” situation here, but the story doesn’t end there.

The Christopher campaign maintains it has copies of more than 2,000 signatures and its attorney, David Langdon, took them to Brunner’s office Friday afternoon.

The only petitions that were not copied were the ones Christopher had picked up on his way to Brunner’s office, Lucas said.

Brunner’s office offers a different story.

In response to Langdon, her office reviewed the 104 partial petitions that he took in Friday and stated “there is no evidence that these part petitions were ever presented to the secretary of state’s office as part of Mr. Christopher’s filing on Feb. 18, 2010.”

Writing on behalf of Brunner, Michael Rankin, assistant secretary of state, points out that one of the petitions submitted Friday was circulated in Shelby County on the same day Christopher appeared in the office around 12:20 p.m.

I’m not sure what that proves. Shelby County is not Mars. About 80 miles separate Columbus and Sidney, the county seat, so it’s possible that volunteers could have circulated petitions that morning to be delivered shortly after noon.

At the same time that the Brunner-Christopher battle was heating up Friday, state Sen. Timothy Grendell, R-Chesterland, got into the fray.

With no odor being too obscure for his olfactory senses, Grendell has never missed the whiff of a scandal in his legislative career.

He fired off a letter to Brunner raising a series of quasi-logical questions, including, “Why did your office bother asking local boards of elections to verify those 788 signatures when they were clearly short of the 1,000 needed to put Mr. Christopher on the ballot?”

Responding to Langdon, Rankin answered Grendell. “In an abundance of caution and so as not to cause any petitions to be withheld from board review, staff sent all petitions to the boards of elections, regardless of the number of signatures initially filed,” Rankin wrote.

There’s an abundance of something there, but I’m not sure it’s caution.

By the end of the day, Christopher did what any self-respecting attorney always does. He sued Brunner.

Rankin succinctly pinpointed the situation now. “The numerous allegations made by Mr. Christopher and his supporters must now be proved in a court of law, where the party bringing the charges bears the burden to prove them,” Rankin noted.

In other words, this is no longer a “he said, she said” debate.

Christopher is going to have to prove he was bumped from the ballot either through omission or commission in Brunner’s office.

For Christopher, this is the chance of a political lifetime. By winning, he can show he was wronged and demonstrate he has the skills, an abundance of skills needed, to actually be attorney general.

Dennis J. Willard can be reached at 614-224-1613 or dwillard@thebeaconjournal.com.