DaytonDailyNews.com

"About the only thing we didn't get today were locusts," Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner quipped on election night.

She was referring to all manner of problems boards of elections had endured: power outages, including in Darke County; bomb threats in two counties; flooding in southeastern Ohio; a snow and ice storm in Cleveland; scattered ballot shortages; a few computer glitches; and orders by two courts to keep selected precincts in Cuyahoga and Sandusky counties open past closing time.

Some of these problems happen every election, but last week's primary was indeed special.

A record 3.5 million people voted, and most of them did so with relative ease.

On the Democratic side, there were 76 percent more votes cast than in 2004 (when Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards were on that Super Tuesday ballot). Republican votes were up 11 percent.

Though the really tough work happens at county boards of elections, Secretary Brunner shares in the credit for this success. She surely would have gotten plenty of blame, after all, if things had not gone well.

In offering her assessment of the election operations, she said, "I think we've gone from being in intensive care to walking on crutches. I think by November we're going to be walking normally on the street like anybody else, and they'll (the media and watchdog groups) probably be looking at some other state."

Secretary Brunner, who voted with a paper ballot because of her concerns about the reliability of touch-screen machines, is caught in a tight spot. On the one hand, she's argued for replacing all the new touch-screen hardware in 53 of Ohio's 88 counties. On the other hand, she's supposed to be reassuring people that every vote counts and making sure that's really true.

That things are working out so well with the touch-screen machines doesn't exactly help her case that the computers are a disaster waiting to happen. Should that ever come to pass, though, she has her backside covered, because she's on record as having vigorously sounded an alarm.

The cost for new machines is $64 million, which is not quite 10 percent of the state's projected deficit for the next 15 months. In this environment, no one is jumping to say that new computers must be a priority, and many people are actually opposing buying them. Some of the stiffest resistance is coming from local elections officials, who insist the equipment they have really is running well.

For voters who are still doubtful, Secretary Brunner ordered elections officials to offer paper ballots. Of course, not many people knew that, so not many exercised that option. (Lucas County had the most requests — 1,817, while many counties reported fewer than 100.)

The paper ballots are not without their problems, and eventually the touch-screen machines are going to be as close to fool-proof as anything humans design.

The contribution Secretary Brunner needs to keep making is to ensure that bugs are identified, acknowledged and fixed, and that poll workers are trained well.

Her job is to worry about every possible calamity, but it's just not affordable to guard against all the remotest possibilities.