Thomas Langhorne has an article for the Evansville Courier Press reporting that Vanderburgh GOP Chairman Brent Grafton has resigned over a controversy over the unauthorized alteration of a state legislator’s profile in a national Republican database.

Grafton came under fire early this week for allowing state Rep. Suzanne Crouch’s primary opponent and several unnamed GOP volunteers to use his log-in credentials to access a secure area of the Republican National Committee’s “Voter Vault” database.

Grafton’s password was enough to enable anyone who had it to edit Voter Vault’s content.

Someone – Crouch’s opponent, Jonathan Fulton, vehemently denies it was him – altered Crouch’s anti-abortion designation to say that she is “pro-choice.”

Advance Indiana has some good coverage of the GOP “Voter Vault” brouhaha here and here. Evansville Courier Press coverage here and here.

MicroVote got its certification, allowing counties to use its machines for Tuesday’s primary elections. Reading the articles in the Courier Press and elsewhere, I get the sense that the certification was granted, not because the Indiana Election Commission was certain of the company’s software, but because there was a deadline and things would get complicated if the certification was not granted.

On a separate note, Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita said Friday he would determine fines for another large election machine vendor – Election Systems & Software – at a May 8 meeting.

Rokita’s office has cited ES&S for 30 violations in a complaint and can now fine the company, which provides the election system in Vanderburgh County, up to $300,000 for each violation. All of the violations listed in the complaint occurred in Marion, Johnson and St. Joseph counties.

Lesley Stedman Weidenbener has an article in the Louisville Courier Journal on county election officials fears that Indiana’s new statewide voter registration system will create delays and problems for this Tuesday’s primary.

They say the computerized system is too slow, and they worry it will crash when election officials in all 92 counties are trying to look up registration information for voters who show up at the wrong polling sites or need to find their precinct.

“I think it’s going to be total chaos,” Clark County Deputy Clerk Shirley Bell said last week. “You have to wait five or 10 minutes to get somebody’s record up.
. . .
“The system does work and it has been heralded as doing everything needed to be done,” said AJ Feeney-Ruiz, press secretary for Secretary of State Todd Rokita. “It is slow sometimes because we’re still in the early stage of using it.”

He said county officials “need to bear with us.”

In addition Laura Herzog, elections supervisor in Hendricks County said the system stopped working for a couple of hours on Saturday and she is not 100% confident it is putting all of the voters in the right precinct.

The Journal & Courier has a good series of articles on primary races in the Lafayette area, including Congressional races for the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Districts of Indiana.

IN-01: four Republicans — Lewis Hass, Richard Holtz, Mark Leyva and Jayson Reeves — are vying for their party’s nomination to challenge Rep. Pete Visclosky who has been the congressman since 1984. Richard Holtz seems to be running on a pro-life platform, Mark Leyva on an anti-tax, anti-immigrant platform. The entries on Jayson Reeves and Lewis Haas don’t seem to lend themselves to that sort of pigeonholing. Haas says he wants government that is more responsive to the little guy and, to the extent he has a focus, it would seem to be on farm programs. Reeves says he would target energy production and services as a priority.

IN-02: Incumbent Chris Chocola faces a primary challenge from Tony Zirkle for the Republican nomination while Joe Donnelly and Steve Francis are competing for the Democratic nomination. In the general election, this is likely to be one of the top three most competitive races along with IN-08 and IN-09. Mr. Zirkle is running against Rep. Chocola because the middle class is getting hammered by things like gas prices and health costs, he is also concerned that we are mortgaging our children’s future with foreign wars. (Right on target there. However, looking at Mr. Zirkle’s website, he is not quite so middle-of-the-road as the J&C article would lead one to believe. He thinks that a woman waives her right to choose to terminate her pregnancy at the moment of intercourse, he seems comfortable with breaking down the wall between church & state, and he wants to impose a draft on deadbeat dads and force them to guard the border against immigrants.)

Meanwhile, in the Democratic primary, Joe Donnelly is seeking a rematch against Chocola against whom he lost in 2004. Donnelly also expresses concern for the plight of the middle class, stating that Washington is currently serving the purposes of “the special interests” and “big oil companies.” He lists as two main issues getting out of Iraq as soon as possible, leaving it in a stable condition (good luck with that) and affordable health care for all Americans. (I’m pulling for Joe here, but being against “the special interests” always makes me roll my eyes. Every constituent has a “special interest” of one type or another.) Mr. Donnelly’s primary challenger is Steve Francis, an economist in South Bend. He lists as main issues creating jobs with living wages, health care, and retirement security as well as disentanglement from Iraq. (I love the word “disentanglement” — for me it conjures up George Washington and his admonition against entangling alliances.

IN-04: There are technically three primary candidates seeking to get the Democratic nomination to challenge incumbent Steve Buyer. However, Darin Kinser did not respond to inquiries from the Journal and Courier, and, anectdotally, I have not heard anything about his campaign. Rick Cornstuble, a 63 year old retired UniServ director with the Indiana State Teachers Association, lists as his two main issues better serving veterans by moving the Veterans Administration out of the Department of Defense and making the VA its own separate entity as well as trying to stimulate the economy by investing in research on alternative fuels — he singles out bio and soy diesel and ethanol. Meanwhile, his opponent David Sanders, a 45 year old professor of biological sciences at Purdue, lists as his main issues, fiscal responsbility — including the impact of Iraq on our federal deficit, and a rational health care system. The biological researcher emerges when he mentions the fact that having a large body of uninsured individuals makes the country completely unprepared for a pandemic response. (A pandemic is an epidemic of enormous proportions — lately bird flu has been touted as a potential pandemic if it mutates in the right way; introduction of a nasty bug by terrorists is another concern.)

There are some new developments in the great Cornstuble domain name squatting caper. Actually, this has been brewing for at least the past week or two, but I haven’t had the time to post about it.

What has gone on before: Rick Cornstuble and David Sanders are running against each other in the Democratic primary for the opportunity to challenge Republican Steve Buyer to represent Indiana’s 4th Congressional District.

Back on March 30, I discovered that sandersforcongress.com redirected people to the Cornstuble site. (sandersforcongress.org is the official site.) The “.com” Sanders URL is registered to Richard Cornstuble and the technical contact is, I believe, Mr. Cornstuble’s son-in-law.

I mentioned on April 5 that Mr. Cornstuble was taking some heat from local Democratic officials for this maneuver.

As of April 17, 2006, the SandersforCongress.com URL was locked and the registry status is “registrar lock”. I’m not sure what all that means exactly, but it no longer reveals Cornstuble on the whois site and no longer redirects to Cornstuble’s site. Somebody obviously disgruntled about the maneuver posted a screenshot of the old whois information here.

Apparently in response to a dust-up over the issue, Mr. Cornstuble’s campaign manager fell on his sword, stating that the decision to purchase the domain name was entirely his call and was something he did because he thought it would aid his candidate and because he was angry at Dr. Sanders for filing at the last second. The campaign manager said, among other things:

Buying up the domain name was simply a very cheap, cost effective way of drawing attention away from Sanders (and also of pointing out how un-serious of a candidate he is for not buying the .com version of his domain).

So, after having read that, imagine my surprise when I mistyped Mr. Cornstuble’s campaign URL (this time going in reverse, typing the “.org” version instead of the “.com” version) and found myself – – – back at my own site. http://www.corn4congress.org redirects to my original entry on the sandersforcongress redirect.

I assure every one, I had nothing to do with the redirect. In fact, I think this domain squatting and redirecting business reflects poorly on everyone who does it. But, I suppose whoever squatted on the “.org” version of Cornstuble’s URL deserves some credit for being a bit more cagey about the whole thing. It’s registered through some anonymizer called “WhoisProtector Inc.”

As far as Cornstuble’s campaign manager’s fear that a Sanders primary challenge would weaken the Democratic effort, I think he is mistaken. Certainly it threatens the lock Mr. Cornstuble would have had on the nomination, but as far as the Democratic Party’s chances generally, I think a vigorous primary season is helpful. Whoever challenges Buyer is going to have an uphill battle. I think a primary challenge generates momentum for the victor going into the general election.