DaytonDailyNews.com

Here's one hope for the presidential election that should unite people: that the winner has a comfortable margin.

Partisans are doing everything they can to undermine the public's confidence in any outcome that's very close. Ohio Republican Party Deputy Chairman Kevin DeWine, a state representative from Fairborn, offers another new charge against Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner every time you turn around. She's the state's top elections official.

"This is exactly the kind of illegal activity Jennifer Brunner is actively working to conceal in this election," he says about one dispute. About another: "These arrogant bullying tactics have no other purpose than to suppress Republican voters."

This is the way Democrats talked about former Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell before the 2004 election. Alarmed by the fact that he held a title in the campaign to re-elect President George W. Bush and was a promoter of a ballot measure preventing gay marriage, they saw partisan motivation in his every decision (except those that favored the Democrats, which they ignored).

But most of his decisions were reasonable. The election was run fairly. In the end, the major problems had to do with an issue outside of his domain: whether some counties had enough voting machines to handle the high turnout.

Now, Secretary Brunner's critics have taken her to court repeatedly, and appealed repeatedly. But they have not gotten much satisfaction. Even when they went to the Bush administration's Justice Department, they found the staff there going off the Republican message and praising Secretary Brunner for cooperation. The department decided not to act.

Meanwhile, she has done fairly well with independent observers, such as the League of Women Voters and academic experts.

The tendency of Secretary Brunner's detractors to go to court all the time is not all bad. The legal issues being raised are too numerous, and they come too fast for concerned citizens to keep up. The court cases remind everybody that whatever a secretary of state does, he or she is answerable to a higher authority. Discretion is sharply limited by laws that are designed to protect the integrity of the voting process.

Moreover, the courts have been admirably quick to take up the elections issues that come before them and quick to handle appeals.

Worth remembering, too, is that the secretary of state doesn't make all the important decisions. Local elections boards run the actual operations on Election Day. And they, by law, are evenly balanced with Republicans and Democrats.

All of which is not to say that nothing can go wrong or that Secretary Brunner is — or Secretary Blackwell was — always right. But they are bound in their official actions in ways that critics are not bound when they rip off sound bites.

(It is also worth knowing that Secretary Brunner had Ohio Republican Chairman Robert Bennett removed from the Cuyahoga County elections board. Her desire to clean house there was well-founded, but he personally was not at fault for the problems. There were hard feelings after that.)

Certainly Republicans have legitimate concerns. Workers for ACORN, a Democratic-leaning community organizing group, have turned in bogus voter registrations. (In the group's defense, it has, itself, brought the problems forward, and experts say false registrations are a far cry from false votes.) Democratic activists also have come from out-of-state to register in Ohio, hoping to help tip the vote for Sen. Barack Obama. (The Franklin County prosecutor got involved in the case where this became public, and the perpetrators have withdrawn their votes.) And some 200,000 new registrants presented ID numbers or something else that conflicts with existing state records.

In the current political environment — with paranoia rampant on the edges of both parties — the people at party headquarters must feel under special pressure to be partisan.

But nobody is obligated to take them seriously. The most partisan, most paranoid Democrats were wrong in their post-2004 claim that the Republicans stole that election in Ohio. And nobody is likely to be able to steal this one.

That said, let's hope it's not close.