Did someone or something flip election results last week in Ohio’s statewide ballot initiative Issue 3 to legalize marijuana? We try to get to the bottom of that question — and many others — on today’s BradCast. (Audio is linked below.)
As initially reported by Ohio’s Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, and later by Steve Rosenfeld, screenshots captured from several different media outlets on Election Night last week show what appear to be impossible results on both Issue 3 and on Issue 1, a ballot measure for redistricting reform in the Buckeye State.
For example, according to screenshots from Dayton’s WHIO-TV website, as published in the Fitrakis, Wasserman and Rosenfeld articles, Issue 3 reportedly had 969,662 “Yes” votes with 39% of precincts reporting. But later in the night, with 45% of precincts, there were only 614,866 “Yes” votes on Issue 3. That’s a seemingly impossible drop of more than 300,000 votes in the initiative that is said to have ultimately failed, according to the unverified election night results reported by the OH Sec. of State.
Similarly, screenshots of results on Issue 1, which ended up reportedly passing, saw “No” votes drop impossibly from 990,555 to 486,596 later in the evening.
What explains these numbers? I spoke to Matt McClellan, Communications Director for Ohio Sec. of State John Husted (R) earlier today. He says that WHIO and the other media outlets whose screenshots were cited by Fitrakis, Wasserman and Rosenfeld, were all Cox Media outlets and “the problem was on their end.”
“Someone was manually entering data,” McClellan told me. “When they noticed the mistake, they made a correction.” He went on to say that the Secretary of State’s website had no such discrepancies or irregularities throughout the evening. His office does not take their own screenshots throughout the night, so we can’t confirm that either way, at the moment, though McClellan says the office “went back and double-checked to make sure” after the issue was initially reported.
In response to the Sec. of State office’s assertions (we offer more detail on them during the show), Fitrakis shared pre-election tracking poll results with me, that suggest the marijuana initiative should have passed, rather than lost, by a 2 to 1 margin. “Tracking polls suggest more that [results] were flipped than not flipped,” he told me today. Fitrakis was is skeptical of the explanation from Husted’s office, while adding that if Cox is manually entering results on the fly on Election Night, “then they need to stop, because it’s absurd.”
For the record, our calls to try and confirm the OH SoS’ claims with WHIO and/or Cox Media have not yet been returned. But, again, much more detail during the program.
As if all of that isn’t enough of a mess, the citizen movement to demand a hand count of the questionable results of last week’s Kentucky Governor’s race continues to grow. A petition has been posted to Change.org asking KY SoS Allison Lundergan Grimes to carry out a hand count of paper ballots statewide. So far, more than 10,000 have signed on to the effort, as we discuss today as well.
Finally on today’s show, Desi Doyen joins us with the latest Green News Report on the fossil fuel industry’s no good, very very bad week…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?fea...;v=WxrTqPW5NSo
Once again, great election coverage Brad.
If the petition to the Kentucky Secretary of State is successful and a count by human beings produces a different result, even the self-styled mainstream press will have a hard time ignoring it.
Every election should have ten or twenty activists taking screen shots from first totals to last if SOS/Elections Board totals, of suspect county totals and of comparable AP totals.