Ohio Secretary of State Race: Substance over Flash
The Dayton Daily News (DDN) offered a stinging article in Sunday’s edition that nailed Republican candidate Greg Hartmann for his willful negligence and foot-dragging in not protecting sensitive personal information on his office website, despite being told by law enforcement officials and private citizens of what might happen if he didn’t act in a timely manner.
Hartmann, whose personal record and professional accomplishments pale when compared to those of his Democratic candidate, Jennifer Brunner, an attorney with years of election law experience who stepped down from the Common Pleas Court bench to run for secretary of state, is now being forced to eat his words on what he will do at the state level to protect identify thieves from hacking his site for the purpose of stealing private information.
The DDN reported that Hartmann, behind in the polls along with most of his slate of Republican candidates, has erroneously accused Brunner of being lax on identity theft but has as Hamilton County clerk of courts left thousands of sensitive documents on his Web site for years despite complaints that the practice could subject people to ID theft.
My experience fighting identity theft as Hamilton County clerk of courts makes me uniquely qualified to advocate on this issue, Hartmann said in a July press release. He boasted he “proactively protected private information by suspending public access to documents via the Web site until all sensitive material can be removed…I thought it was an issue we needed to address — Social Security numbers on our Web site — but this was not a no brainer” Hartmann said recently. “When you start messing around with a public record it can be a problem legally.”
Hartmann is a former Hamilton County assistant prosecutor. His father Robin P. Hartmann is a partner in the Dallas, Texas law firm of Haynes Boone and represented Dick Cheney in his quest to be included on the 2000 Bush ticket by making a case that Cheney’s real residence was in Wyoming, not Texas where he lived and worked as CEO of Halliburton. Having arrived in Ohio from Texas just seven years ago, inquiring minds are curious about how such a mediocre, lackluster performer like Hartmann rose to high office in the Hamilton County GOP and became the party’s candidate this year for secretary of state.
The DDN documented that it took Hartmann three years after entering office to take down the sensitive information from his office’s website despite being prodded by citizens and local law enforcement officers and sued over the records. So flagrant were his violations, that not only did the site experience about 400,000 hits a month, but in 2002 it got the attention of the New York Times as well.
The DDN revealed that shortly after Hartmann became Hamilton County clerk of courts, at least four people e-mailed his office with concerns that online documents could put people at risk for identity theft. Hartmann, the paper noted, kept the documents online, and 10 months later appointed a task force to study the issue, saying he did so because he wanted to involve attorneys and the courts in deciding how to handle it.
By fall 2004, the Blue Ash Police Department in suburban Cincinnati told Hartmann that several suspects had told police how easily they were able to “steal” public information from the clerk’s Web site to create new identities. One man knew of arrest warrants for him so he went to Hartmann’s site, looked up someone’s traffic ticket and made a new fake ID, Blue Ash Police Sgt. Joe Boyatt wrote to Hartmann.
The DDN article said the man used the false ID to steal a car off a dealer’s lot and withdraw $8,500 from another person’s bank account before being arrested in Florida. Hey, hotshot, way to go. With public protectors like Hartmann asleep at the switch, criminals are probably lying awake at night thinking how easy it will be to steal more identifies if the razzle-dazzle kid gets elected. Fortunately for the public, Hartmann and his crew of Republicans will be turned out by Ohio voters who have woken up to the sad state of their state after decades of Republican control.
In December 2004, Cynthia Lambert, a pharmacist, filed a federal lawsuit against Hartmann and the county, saying someone stole her identity based on a traffic ticket Hartmann’s office posted online in September 2004. The day after the lawsuit was filed, Hartmann removed 320,000 traffic tickets from the Web site. He maintains it was his task force recommendations, not Lambert’s lawsuit, that prompted the action.
Lambert’s attorney Chris Jenkins doesn’t buy it and said Hartmann was well aware of the problems for two years, but he did nothing until he was sued — a charge Hartmann denies, the DNN wrote.
Why won’t he take responsibility?” said Jenkins, who said he doesn’t think Hartmann is ready to oversee state documents and elections. That’s really my question. It’s undisputable now that hundreds of people have actually had their identity stolen because he operated this Web site,” he said.
But like his good friend and political buddy George W. Bush, who has now cemented himself in a state of denial about his Iraq War and refuses to admit he would do things differently despite the mess he has created, Hartmann said, he would not have handled things differently.
This is a challenging issue. You know what, I could have just pulled the whole Web site down three years ago and not provided any access, but I didn’t think that was the right thing to do. I’m on the front edge of this issue in Ohio. I’ve tried to balance public access with the need to protect privacy,” he said.
With the job the DDN did yesterday in alerting Ohio voters to the accident-waiting-to-happen history of Hartmann, it is time for Ohioans to see the “Texas Flash” for what he is: another Republican hypocrite who will sell out Ohio taxpayers to advance his political career and dole out favors to his lawyer and vendor buddies, like Blackwell before him has done.
In this important election, Ohio voters need to understand that what’s at stack is restoring trust and integrity to Ohio’s system of elections. Hartmann is just a younger version of Blackwell, who outsourced the services of secretary of state to private vendors with no-bid contracts and who has acted as a partisan politician throughout his eight years running the office.
Congrats to the DDN. Maybe other Ohio reporters will take Hartmann to task for what he says and what he does, which are mutually exclusive when given a minimal amount of scrutiny.
For these reasons and others, like being severely admonished by the Supreme Court of Ohio for violating laws related to timely notices he neglected to send as a favor to his attorney friends who needed more time to delay certain cases, Ohio newspapers are coming forward with their endorsements for Brunner. The Akron Beacon Journal, The Springfield Sun News, The Dayton Daily News and now The Columbus Dispatch have said Brunner is the right person at the right time with the right credentials and qualifications to become the state’s next secretary of state.
