A project of the Democracy Alliance, the Secretary of State Project (SoSP) was established in July 2006 as an independent “527” organization devoted to helping Democrats get elected to the office of Secretary of State in selected swing, or battleground, states; these were states where the margin of victory in the 2004 presidential election (between George W. Bush and John Kerry) had been 120,000 votes or less.
The idea for SoSP germinated shortly after that 2004 election, when the group’s Democrat founders blamed Kerry’s defeat on then-Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican, who had ruled that Ohio (where Bush won by a relatively slim 118,599-vote margin) would not count provisional ballots -- even those submitted by properly registered voters -- if they had been submitted at the wrong precinct. Though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ultimately upheld Blackwell’s decision, SoSP’s founders nonetheless received the ruling with the same bitterness they had felt regarding former Florida (Republican) Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s handling of the infamous ballot recount in 2000 (when Bush defeated Al Gore in the presidential election). Moreover, SoSP's founders accused Blackwell and Republicans of conspiring to suppress Democratic voter turnout in Ohio. “We were tired of Republican manipulation of elections,” said SoSP co-founder Michael Kieschnick, who also serves as President of Working Assets. “It seemed like lots of decisions were made by people who were pretty clearly political operatives.”
To establish “election protection” against similar disappointments in subsequent political races, SoSP in 2006 targeted its funding efforts on the Secretary of State races in seven swing states -- Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Colorado, and Michigan. Democrats emerged victorious in five of those seven elections -- all except Colorado and Michigan. As USA Today reported at the time: “The political battle for control of the federal government has opened up a new front: the obscure but vital state offices that determine who votes and how those votes are counted.”
In a 2008, pre-Election Day article assessing SoSP’s overall strategy, Politico.com reported:
“In anticipation of a photo-finish presidential election, Democrats have built an administrative firewall designed to protect their electoral interests in five of the most important battleground states. The bulwark consists of control of secretary of state offices in five key states … With a Democrat now in charge of the[se] offices, which oversee and administer their state’s elections, the party is better positioned than in the previous elections to advance traditional Democratic interests —such as increasing voter registration and boosting turnout — rather than Republican priorities such as stamping out voter fraud. Perhaps more important, in those five states Democrats are now in a more advantageous position when it comes to the interpretation and administration of election law — a development that could benefit Barack Obama if any of those states are closely contested on Election Day.”
In addition to the aforementioned Michael Kieschnick, SoSP was co-founded by James Rucker (a former director of MoveOn.org Political Action and Moveon.org Civic Action) and Becky Bond (a young woman who today is affiliated with Working Assets, US PIRG, and the New Organizing Institute). Said Bond: “Any serious commitment to wrestling control of the country from the Republican Party must include removing their political operatives from deciding who can vote and whose votes will count.”
According to political analyst Matthew Vadum, SOSP’s founders and foot soldiers
“religiously believe that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 ... and in Ohio in 2004.... The secretary of state candidates [whom] 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.”
SoSP raised a total of $500,000 for the 2006 Secretary of State candidates whom it supported. Because few Americans realize the importance of the Secretary of State’s duties, races for that office tend to draw fewer (and smaller) donations than do the more prominent races. Consequently, even a modest injection of cash from a small handful of generous donors can make an enormous difference in the comparative financial resources of rival campaigns, and thereby tip the scales decidedly in favor of the better-funded candidate.
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.
Another 2006 beneficiary of SoSP support was Mark Ritchie, a former community organizer with close ties to ACORN, who defeated a two-term incumbent Republican in the race for Minnesota Secretary of State. Ritchie acknowledged his debt to SoSP when he said, “I want to thank the Secretary of State Project and its thousands of grass-roots donors for helping to push my campaign over the top.” Other contributors to Ritchie’s campaign included George Soros, Drummond Pike, Deborah Rappaport (wife of venture capitalist Andrew Rappaport), and Heather Booth.
Like Jennifer Brunner, Ritchie went on to play a significant role in a key state election two years later. In 2008 the conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority exhorted Ritchie to conduct "a thorough review and verification of all voter-registration records," citing some 261,000 duplicative registrations and 63,000 voters listing invalid or nonexistent addresses. But Ritchie dismissed these pleas as efforts “to create a cloud over an election so people don't accept the outcome.”
In Minnesota’s 2008 election for U.S. Senate, incumbent Senator Norm Coleman, a Republican, finished 725 votes ahead of Democrat challenger Al Franken. But Franken refused to concede, and the thin margin of victory triggered an automatic recount. With Mark Ritchie presiding over the recount process during the ensuing weeks, Coleman's lead gradually dwindled due to a host of what journalist Matthew Vadum describes as a long series of "appalling irregularities" that almost invariably benefited Franken. A detailed account of these irregularities can be found here. By the time the recount (and a court challenge by Coleman) ended in April 2009, Franken held a 312-vote lead. On June 30, 2009, after the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously rejected a Coleman lawsuit, the Republican officially conceded and Franken was declared the victor.
In 2008, SOSP supported Democratic Secretary of State candidates in Missouri, Montana, Oregon and West Virginia; all four Democrats won. Again SoSP realized a high return on a relatively small financial investment. As of September, the group had raised $280,000 for the campaigns it was targeting -- not a large sum by any means, but enough to have a profound effect on the lightly funded Secretary of State races.
Among the more notable contributors to SoSP are Democracy Alliance members George Soros, Rob Stein, Gail Furman, and Susie Tompkins Buell.