The office of Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner on Monday afternoon said that it is limiting the functionality of its web site after its tech department had detected a security breach.

“Due to security concerns experienced by the Secretary of State’s website, full functionality of the website has been suspended to protect the integrity of state records and data. Full functionality will be restored when we are assured that all data has been protected to acceptable levels of security,” Brunner said in a statement issued Monday afternoon. “Our focus is and has always been to protect the vote of every eligible Ohio voter from any kind of fraud, be it voter registration fraud, illegal voting or vote suppression. This action has been taken to detect and prosecute any illegal breach of our voting infrastructure to maintain voter confidence."

"What we know is our IT department detected a situation with our Web site where there was somehow suspicious activity where someone could have gotten into our site and tried to move things around," a spokesman told The Cleveland Plain Dealer Monday afternoon.

The office's statement noted that "this is not the first instance of direct assault on the operations of the Secretary of State's office."

The office has been barraged with phone calls and e-mails "with menacing messages and even threats of harm or death," according to the statement.

The Ohio SOS' office says that it recently received a suspicious unidentified powder, and that all of these incidents are under investigation.

Brunner, a Democrat, and her office are embroiled in a bitter dispute with the state Republican Party, which filed a lawsuit earlier this year demanding that her office release a list of new voter registrations that don't match state and federal database records.

The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled last Tuesday that

Brunner had to provide election boards with the lists of voter information that didn't match state databases of drivers' license information or social security databases.

But Brunner argued in an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court that mismatches could appear because of trivial reasons such as typos, and that the last minute challenges at the polls could increase tension, the potential for confusion, and long lines. Moreover, the

Republican party had two years to challenge the screening process, but hadn't moved to do so until now, she argued.

The high court on Friday stayed the lower court decision reasoning that the Republican Party wasn't likely to prevail in its lawsuit.

The state Republican party then turned around and filed another lawsuit to achieve a similar goal of verification in state court.

Briefs from both sides are due this Friday.

Ohio has 20 electoral votes, and is a battleground state. President

Bush won Ohio in 2004 by 118,457 votes out of 5.6 million cast amid a chaotic scene of long lines, and voting machine shortages and malfunctions.

Voter registration records this year in Ohio show record levels of registrations.

The state reported last week that it has registered more than eight million voters. The state registered just under eight million voters last November 2004.

The office did not return a follow-up phone call with questions about why a web site hack would affect the office's records and data.

__Update: __The state lawsuit has been dropped. But The Next Right's Soren Dayton writes in to note that Brunner has actually lost two other disputes with the Republicans.

As reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

On Oct. 2, Ohio Republicans won a separate court fight with Brunner over absentee ballots cast by McCain supporters. The state's Supreme

Court countermanded Brunner's order that local election boards reject the ballots if the applicant hadn't checked a box indicating he or she was a "qualified voter" when submitting the absentee ballot.

And from* The Columbus Dispatch*:

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner must order counties to allow observers at sites where early absentee voting is taking place, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled today in a 4-3 opinion. Brunner, a Democrat, had advised county boards of elections not to allow observers where in-person absentee ballots were being cast. ...

(Image: Spatulated)

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