14 DAY TRIAL // The website has been taken offline as soon as the security breach was noticed on Monday and was restored the next day, although in a temporary static form. This incident follows accusations of voter registration fraud coming from the Republican Party, the Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner being a Democrat.
With the elections getting closer, the tensions are getting high and the Secretary of State already reported ongoing investigations regarding numerous received phone calls or e-mail messages that contained harm and death threats. The office even received a suspicious package containing an unidentified white powder via mail. The package had a message attached that said "Death to Obama supporters."
According to Brunner, no voting registration information has been compromised in this attack, but the "static" state of the website will be enforced until the office is 100% sure that all security issues have been resolved. "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," she said.
The Ohio State Highway Patrol will assist with the investigation of this incident and hopefully identify the attacker(s). "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," added Secretary Brunner.
Ohio is considered, just like in 2004, a key state for the presidential elections. In the previous race for the White House, George W. Bush won in Ohio by a difference of only 119,000 votes. The Republican Party obtained a court order that forced Brunner to recheck the application of many new registered voters, because their driver license numbers did not match the SSNs. The U.S. Supreme Court blocked this order last week, which only added to the already existent tension.