Foxnews:

Since 2006 the Democracy Alliance, a left leaning influence group funded by George Soros among others, has had remarkable success in targeting and claiming Secretary of State's offices in 11 of 13 critical states they targeted, including Ohio, Minnesota and Iowa.

Called the Secretary of State Project (SOSP) its aim is to target and capture the obscure, often overlooked office and implement election rules changes that give democrats a better chance of winning a plurality. Among those changes that SOSP calls "election protection," are a loosening of voter registration requirements and a lessening of efforts to prevent fraudulent voting, according to Matthew Vadum, a political analyst with the Capitol Research Center.

'The thing that is amazing is that they can get the office for as little $100,000 in campaign funding because no one pays attention to it, and they get to control election opportunities in a state. It is cheap," Vadum said.
He said SOSP is currently targeting three states in the 2010 election: California, Michigan and Minnesota. In total they count for 82 electoral votes.

Vadum says that because of chaos and demoralization the Republican Party has not formulated a response to the SOSP or tried to match their efforts.

Brunner has been a disaster in Ohio, unless you are trying to rig the game for the dems. There was tons of shadiness in Ohio for the 2008 election. The good news about Brunner is that she's running for US Senate where she can do less damage, even if she wins.

Frontpage Mag:

Brunner made news in October 2008 when she declined to hand over to county election boards 200,000 names on voter registration forms where the drivers license or Social Security number on the forms did not match the name. The SoS project praised her actions.

Foxnews source coinsides with Frontpage:

Blackwell's office was one of the first and most critical offices claimed by SOSP. He was succeeded in 2006 by Jennifer Bruner, who received $167,000 in campaign contributions from SOSP, and immediately began a complete overhaul of Ohio's voting system. Among the changes she made were allowing election day registration and the failure to purge election rolls of ineligible and dead voters.
Her most memorable moment was when a federal court judge ruled that she had violated federal law for "not taking adequate steps to validate the identity of newly registered voters." At the time she admitted that there were "discrepancies" in about 200,000 new registrations but refused to allow polling workers to take action on the questionable ballots.

One of the watchdogs, followed Brunner's shenanigans closely. From Discovering the Networks.

When Jennifer Brunner defeated incumbent Kenneth Blackwell in Ohio in 2006, twelve of the eighteen individuals who contributed the maximum $10,000 to Brunner's campaign resided in states other than Ohio. (One of those donors, incidentally, was Teresa Heinz Kerry.) Said Brunner, "I received significant support from the SoS Project, which helped me toward the election."

Brunner went on to make her influence felt in the 2008 election cycle, when she ruled that Ohio residents should be permitted, during the designated early-voting period extending from late September to early October, to register and vote on the very same day. Citing the potential for voter fraud under such an arrangement, Republicans objected. But on September 29 of that year -- the day before early voting was scheduled to commence -- the Ohio Supreme Court affirmed Brunner's decision.

In a separate matter, Brunner sought to effectively invalidate a million absentee-ballot applications that Republican presidential candidate John McCain's campaign had issued. Each of those applications had been inadvertently printed with an extra, unnecessary checkbox, and Brunner maintained that if a registrant failed to check the box -- even if he or she signed the form -- the application could be rejected. On October 2, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned Brunner's directive on grounds that it served "no vital purpose or public interest."

Brunner's most noteworthy claim to fame took place in October 2008, when she refused to provide county election boards approximately 200,000 voter-registration forms in which the name did not match the driver's license or Social Security number.

Count the dems, and reject the GOP votes. Boss Tweed would be proud. That's what the Sec of State Project wanted, and what they got.

Mark Ritchie was the Secretary of State who certified Al Franken's win on a recount. He was a Sec of State Project candidate and here's the result.

Foxnews:

(Mary) Kiffmeyer is "absolutely sure" that Ritchie's efforts to eliminate voting regulations ensured Franken's victory.
"The first thing he did when he got into office was to dismantle the ballot reconciliation program we started. Under that program districts are required to check that the number of ballots issued by matching them with the number of ballots cast," she said, "that way we know immediately that the vote count is accurate."
But that isn't what happened, she said. We now have 17,000 more ballots cast than there are voters who voted and no way to determine what went wrong. Why anyone would eliminate that basic check, I don't know," she said.

The Vadum guy quoted earlier was Matthew Vadum. He's one of the main guys at Capitol Research, a good organization has tracked the shadiness of these foundations and similar groups for years. He wrote a good piece in the American Spectator about the Franken-Coleman race and its Secretary of State.

Both Franken and Obama, by the way, were endorsed by ACORN Votes, ACORN's federal political action committee.

Minnesota's secretary of state isn't a Democrat by happenstance.

Ritchie, who defeated two-term incumbent Republican Mary Kiffmeyer in 2006, received an endorsement and financial assistance for his run from a below-the-radar non-federal "527" group called the Secretary of State Project. The entity can accept unlimited financial contributions and doesn't have to disclose them publicly until well after the election.

The founders of the Secretary of State Project, which claims to advance "election protection" but only backs Democrats, religiously believe that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 (Katherine Harris) and in Ohio in 2004 (Ken Blackwell).

The secretary of state candidates the group endorses sing the same familiar song about electoral integrity issues: Voter fraud is largely a myth, vote suppression is used widely by Republicans, cleansing the dead and fictional characters from voter rolls should be avoided until embarrassing media reports emerge, and anyone who demands that a voter produce photo identification before pulling the lever is a racist, democracy-hating Fascist.

Most media reports also leave out the fact that Ritchie has extensive ties to the controversial in-your-face direct action group, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), whose employees have been implicated in electoral fraud time and time again.

In 2006, the Minnesota ACORN Political Action Committee endorsed Ritchie and donated to his campaign. According to the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, contributors to Ritchie's campaign included liberal philanthropists George Soros, Drummond Pike, and Deborah Rappaport, along with veteran community organizer Heather Booth, a Saul Alinsky disciple who co-founded the Midwest Academy, a radical ACORN clone. One article on Ritchie's 2006 campaign website brags about the fine work ACORN did in Florida to pass a constitutional amendment to raise that state's minimum wage.

ACORN got their man in. Their man made sure Stuart Smalley became a senator. The good news is that Mark Ritchie is running for re-election in Minnesota. Hopefully, the good people there throw his sorry ass out.

But closer to home, the Secretary of State Project wants their own Mark Ritchie or Jennifer Brunner right here in Michigan. Her name is Jocelyn Benson. What are Benson's credentials?

Benson's a native of Philly, well known for vote fraud. She went to Harvard Law. I've seen enough damage done by Harvard Law politicians like Obama and Granholm to refuse to back anyone who went there for political office. In 2004, for the democrats, she ran the poll challenging/poll watching programs for the DNC. They want the fox guarding the henhouse. She's also a protege of Jennifer Brunner.Yes, that Brunner. She was recently endorsed (before dems convention) by the SEIU, the most far left of the union leadership.

The Blog Prof has been on the case researching Benson with posts here and here.

In order to ensure that elections are fair, conducted with integrity, and legitimate, Jocelyn Benson and her friends at Secretary of State Project MUST be defeated by any legal means necessary. We must keep ACORN, PIRG-IM, Soros, Moveon.org, and the rest of those groups out of the Sec of State office here.

We'll be keeping a close eye on this race, and there's no better spot than Campaign Finance Reports. BS walks, and money talks, much of it coming from out of state sources. Benson as of January 1st, had $200,000 to dump in this race. It's a quite interesting list. Here's some of the out of state money. A lot of this is from NY, Massachusetts, California, and the Washington DC area.

• Alida Messinger, New York City - $3400, one of the Rockefellers. Senator Jay's sister. 


• Secretary of State Project, Santa Cruz, California - $3200


• Rob McKay, San Francisco - $3400, Taco Bell heir and part of Soros's "Democracy Alliance


• Megan Hull, Washington DC - $3400 - Secretary of State Project


• Ellen Kurz, Cambridge MA - $2000 - Former staffer of Mike Dukakis


• Blair Hull, Chicago - $3400 - Former Senate Candidate, trader, sold his company to Goldman Sachs


• Craig Kaplan, New York City - $1370 - Project Vote Board of Directors


• Mary Delaney, Oakand CA - $1500 - Akonadi Foundation  (Also big Emily's List donor)


• Tom Cosgrove, Cambridge MA - $500 - Dukakis worker, and Huffington Post poster


• Dan Payne, Newton MA - $500 - Massachusetts political consultant


• Amy Pritchard, Washington DC, $500 - DC Consultant


• Jack Corrigan, Brookline MA, $500 - Head Lawyer in Palm Beach County for Gore "Re-re-re-count" efforts. 


• Patricia Bauman, Washington DC, $750 - Bauman Foundation, Pew environmental


• Joe Ganley, Wellesley, MA, $500 - Former Campaign manager to Chris Gabrieli (lost to Patrick in 06 primary)


• Lani Guinier, Cambridge MA, $500 - Clinton's nomination for Assistant Attorney General, supports pure racial quotas and proportional representation on local levels. 


• Laura Quinn, Washington DC, $500 - Al Gore's former Communications director


• Ann McPhail, Arlington VA, $500 - International Monetary Fund


• Holly Schadler, Chevy Chase MD, $500 - Lobbyist, Sierra Club, Clintonite


• Tom Hsieh, San Francisco CA, $500 - Former member San Francisco Board of Supervisors, consultant


• Celinda Lake, Washington DC, $500 - Al Gore's Pollster


• Bill Roberts, Brooklyn NY, $500 - Atlantic Philanthropies - supports Illegal aliens, Aspen Institute, left wing "vote protection" (ie fraud doesn't exist), League of Conservation Voters, Tides Foundation (George Soros),


• Michael Kieschnick, Palo Alto CA, $2000 - One of the founders of the Secretary of State Project and CREDO (Working Assets)


• Joseph Sandler, Bethesda MD, $750 - DNC lawyer, moveon.org advisor, 


• Myles Duffy, Brooklyn NY, $450 - Howard Dean guy


• Gene Karpinski, Arlington VA, $400 - League of Conservation Voters


• Chip Amoe, Washington DC, $366.89 - Lobbyist


• Spencer Overton, Chevy Chase MD, $250.00 - Obama's Deputy Assistant AG for office of legal policy. Worked with "Common Cause" and NAACP's election team. 


• Noah McCormack, Cambridge MA, $250.00 - Harvard Fellow


• Scott Nielsen, Chicago IL, $250.00 - Tied to Soros, Joyce Foundation, and Democracy Alliance (Sec of State Fund)


• Alvaro Bedoya - Washington DC, $250.00 - Counsel to Al Franken, also associate of Soros


• Caron Atlas, Brooklyn NY, $300.00 - Fractured Atlas, Brooklyn Arts organization


• Sanford Newman, Takoma Park MD, $250.00 - Project Vote, associate of ACORN. Where Obama got his start in politics. 


• Sujata Tejwani, New York City, $250.00 - Camp Wellstone (former MN senator Paul Wellstone)


• Andrew Tobias, Miami, $250.00 - Treasurer for democrats, pushed for no fault insurance requirements in California, and absolutely loves current no-fault insurance law in Michigan (but lives in Florida)


• Anne Bartley, San Francisco, $250.00 - Rockefeller funds, Democracy Alliance, and "Grass Roots" Policy Project (SEIU)


• Christopher Edley, Berkeley CA, $750.00 - Dean of University of Cal Berkeley Law School


• Becky Bond, San Francisco, $250.00 - Working Assets/CREDO - (Which raises money for Greenpeace and Planned Parenthood [Barrenhood])


• Kenneth Robinson, Providence RI, $250.00 - Bank Lobbyist


• Jonah Goldman, Washington DC, $250.00 - Glover Park Group, and Democrat voting pusher


• Mark Friedrichs, Washington DC, $250.00 - Department of Energy


• Julia Cohen, Washington DC, $250.00 - Campus Progress (and heads up for vote fraud on campuses)


• Thurgood Marshall Jr, Arlington VA, $250.00 - Former Clinton Attorney, Third Way


• Jackie Bray, Washington DC, $250.00, Staffer for Terry McAuliffe campaign (Clintons's DNC guy)


• Greg Speed, Washington DC, $250.00 - America Votes  (George Soros, Peter Lewis, Herb and Marion Sandler) - also has ties to ACORN, Brady Gun grabbers, Emily's List, SEIU, and a who's who of leftist causes


• Jonathan Barry, Brooklyn NY, $250.00 - Goldman Sachs


• Shaunna Thomas, Washington DC, $250.00 - People for the Unamerican Way


• Angelique Pirozzi, Boston MA, $250.00 -  Organizational Specialist of the National Education Association


• Robert Richman, St Paul MN, $250.00 - Paul Wellstone guy. Grass Roots Solutions. Consulting Firm tied to AFL-CIO. One of his favorite organizers - Saul Alinsky