And we wouldn't be surprised if they spent even more.
The Columbus Dispatch reports on the path they'll take to persuade voters that destroying government unions is a good thing.
That path ...includes focusing on components of Senate Bill 5 that poll favorably with voters.
For example, the last two Quinnipiac polls show that voters favor provisions that require public employees to pay for at least 15 percent of their health care, contribute at least 10 percent toward their pensions, and get paid based on merit instead of tenure...
Now, Building a Better Ohio will simply attempt to divide Senate Bill 5 in voters’ minds, sell the law as a cost-savings measure, and try to do it without demonizing union members or engaging in class warfare.In addition to heavy pro-SB5 advertising, we can probably also count on Republican dirty tricks. Ohio Republicans honed them to an art during the 2004 election. New evidence suggests strongly that Ohio's Republican secretary of state, Ken Blackwell, hired an information technology company to hack into Ohio's election results and change the outcome to favor George W. Bush. (That explains the sudden late-night shift of votes to Bush.)
The Free Press reports that Blackwell hired Karl Rove's IT guru to set up a system that transferred Ohio's vote results to a partisan Republican server site in Tennessee called SmarTech. The Free Press quotes computer security expert Stephen Spoonamore:
Spoonamore explained that "they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want."...
Spoonamore concluded from the architectural maps of the Ohio 2004 election reporting system that, "SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle."Read the whole thing here.
A "man in the middle" is a deliberate computer hacking setup, which allows a third party to sit in between computer transmissions and illegally alter the data. A mirror site, by contrast, is designed as a backup site in case the main computer configuration fails.
Spoonamore claims that he confronted then-Secretary of State Blackwell at a secretary of state IT conference in Boston where he was giving a seminar in data security. "Blackwell freaked and refused to speak to me when I confronted him about it...
