With new, scandalous updates every day, it's hard to remember how this whole thing started - something about "margarita night" at Attorney General Marc Dann's condo and a female staffer waking up in his friend's bed with her pants undone, as we recall. But all that got lost in the shuffle last week, as Dann went on the offensive, hiring Jason Stanford, an "opposition researcher" from Texas, to wage war against anyone asking for his resignation.

Opposition researchers are the mercenaries of the political world, hitmen who target reputations instead of body parts. They dig up dirt on enemies and find ways to leak it to the media so that there's no blood on their client's hands when it's over. Normally, Stanford's job is fighting the good fight against the GOP - his Web site states, "We serve Republicans. Would you like them skewered, roasted or deep-fried?" But it's not just R's who are after Dann's hide, and some speculate that Stanford was brought in to go after local Dems who have excommunicated him from the party. That speculation was fueled by Gov. Ted Strickland's apparent backpedal last week on the matter of impeachment.

The Free Times did a little digging of its own - into Stanford's background. First of all, his MySpace page is way lame (Closer is one of your favorite movies? Really?). Also not cool: embellishing your resume.

Stanford's Web site says he worked "as a reporter in the Los Angeles Times bureau" in Moscow. So we checked. "From what I'm seeing in the Times' database, Jason Stanford was not on staff," writes the paper's reader rep in an e-mail. "There is one byline on the Times from him, in 1993, but it is marked Special to the Times" (indicating that he was a freelancer).

Asked by Free Times to clarify, Stanford maintains he was paid hourly and recalls three bylines. He says he did more research than actual reporting. He doesn't feel he's being deceptive. "Whatever," he says.

Back in Texas, Stanford is involved in a little scandal of his own. According to the Austin Chronicle, Stanford was working as campaign manager for Jason Meeker, a candidate for Austin City Council, when he abruptly quit at the end of March. Stanford then went to work on a batch of negative ads that smeared Meeker's opponents. The ads reportedly were financed by an electronics store owner who used to be Meeker's campaign treasurer. It apparently was a sneaky way around Texas campaign finance laws, which limit personal contributions to $300 and may be illegal, if Meeker was behind the whole thing. The candidates targeted by the ads have complained to the Texas Ethics Commission.

Stanford sounded weary when Free Times called him again Monday morning, regarding the claims of a woman who contacted Free Times after our April 30 cover story. She says she had an affair with Dann in 1988, while the two worked on a campaign in West Virginia.

When we first mentioned this to Stanford last week, he implied that we should be embarrassed. By Monday, however, he'd retreated to that old scandal standby, "No comment." — James Renner

OH YEAH, WE'RE STILL AT WAR

Two local chapters of Students for Democratic Society, decked out in glammy dresses and carrying a peace flag, gathered downtown Friday for a "Funk the War Dance Party Protest."

The event had been rescheduled from the previous Friday because of bad weather, and moved from the military recruitment center at Severance Town Center in Cleveland Heights to the downtown location because, according to Shaker Heights High School SDS president Josh Davidson, even though the military recruitment center is a public office conducting public business, it does so in space rented from a private entity, and therefore is not subject to constitutional guarantees of free speech.

About 30 students, under the vigilance of at least one police car, marched down Superior to Public Square, chanting, "Money for drugs and education, not for war and occupation." Signs urged people to "Drop beats, not bombs" and "Resist, don't enlist."

Davidson and two representatives from the Lakeland Community College chapter of SDS, who would only give their first names, Drew and Libby, expressed concerns that the war in Iraq had lost its place on the front page of newspapers, and therefore its place in American consciousness. They said their near-term plans for SDS involve unifying and organizing local chapters into one louder voice. — Michael Gill

AND THE COUNT GOES ON

Earlier this month, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections completed its first-ever voluntary post-election audit. But the exercise appears to have fallen short of what many observers say needs to be a critical piece of ensuring sound elections.

Post-election audits should serve a variety of purposes: instill public confidence in the final result, deter fraud, detect errors in the election process, and provide feedback on how to improve voting technology and election administration. It's unclear which, if any, of these objectives Cuyahoga County's week-long audit accomplished.

Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner had required audits to count 7 percent of all ballots cast. In Cuyahoga County, that equaled just over 30,000 votes in close to 100 ballot boxes. Teams of two hand-counted ballots. These were also run through optical scanners to make sure machine counts reconciled with the hand counts. If any precinct had more than a five-vote discrepancy, the SOS directive demanded manual recounts.

CCBOE's one-page audit summary found no significant gaps or shortfalls and then concluded that "hand-counted ballot totals perfectly matched the machine scanned count."

Adele Eisner is an ardent CCBOE observer and a member of Brunner's Voting Rights Advisory Council. She says the post-election audit (which she observed every day) amounted to a manual recount - something the board already does well. Eisner says that it's no surprise that manual audit tallies correlated exactly with the optical scan numbers. That's because the ES&S scanners, which tabulated ballots after they were hand-counted, were counting only one precinct at a time. (In a real election, multiple precincts are fed into a single scanner simultaneously.)

There were also problems in how the BOE selected 7 percent of the vote total for auditing, according to observers. The board went down a list of cities alphabetically and then selected precincts at random within those political subdivisions. A better method might have been to chose based on where lay the highest risks of inaccuracy, the smallest margins of victory or where anomalies were already beginning to appear.

Eisner also faults the SOS audit directive for not including "chain of custody" issues and other election administration processes like security procedure audits and spot checks of poll books with ballot numbers.

"It's a pilot, it's experimental," says Ron Olson, also a member of Brunner's Voting Rights Advisory Council, where he's been leading the charge for statewide post-election auditing. "So it's not a thorough audit, and they're learning as much as auditing."

Olson also took issue with the way precincts were selected. Another concern was the inability for public observers to participate. (After the CCBOE's May 2006 election debacle, a public audit was led by outside experts. The public was allowed to handle ballots.)

Nevertheless, Olson is pleased by the board's effort to involve activists like himself and Eisner more than the previous board did. Olson and Eisner also hope that this experiment means that both the SOS and CCBOE will gear up for more effective post-election audits come November.

"This audit amounts to starting your car and driving it around the block before racing in the real Indy 500," Olson says. "It's necessary and good, but not sufficient." — Charu Gupta