Citing “homeland security concerns”, Warren County, OH was alone in locking out media from their counting of ballots on Election Night. They were amongst the last to report their tallies that night, and according to Ohio’s Election Night website Warren County ended up having the highest percentage of Bush votes amongst all of Ohio counties that had a total vote turnout greater than 22,500.
There were only four counties with a higher percentage vote for Bush, and they all had 22,279 voters or less:
So what happened that night in Warren County when all of America was waiting for the counting to finish in Ohio to decide the election? Why was it the only county in all of Ohio where media was not allowed to witness the counting?
The Cincinnati Enquirer explained it this way:
County officials say they took the action Tuesday night for homeland security, although state elections officials said they didn’t know of any other Ohio county that closed off its elections board. Media organizations protested, saying it violated the law and the public’s rights. The Warren results, delayed for hours because of long lines that extended voting past the scheduled close of polls, were part of the last tallies that helped clinch President Bush’s re-election.
“The media should have been permitted into the area where there was counting,” Enquirer attorney Jack Greiner said. “This is a process that should be done in complete transparency and it wasn’t.”
Warren County Emergency Services Director Frank Young said he had recommended increased security based on information received from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in recent weeks.
Commissioners made the security decisions in a closed-door meeting last week, but didn’t publicize the restrictions that were made until after polls closed.
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Typically, the Warren County commissioners’ room is set up as a gathering place for people to watch the votes come in. But that wasn’t done this year.
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A representative of The Associated Press, which had stringers at every Ohio board of elections site, said no such election-night access problems were reported outside of Warren County.
It’s ashame both Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are apparently now dead, isn’t it?
UPDATE: MSNBC is reporting that “the federal government” was involved in the lock-down!:
Connect. The. Dots. People.
UPDATE: 11/10/04 5:5pm PT Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s Countdown — virtually the only major media organization giving this story the coverage it deserves — has just reported that both the FBI and the Homeland Security Dept. have denied giving warnings in Ohio to anybody about anything. That would be contrary to the claims made in this report which quotes a letter from the President of the Elections Board in Warren explaining that the lockdown was due to warnings they’d recieved from the FBI. The letter says in part:
Okay. So now who’s telling the truth? And why did they lock down Warren County and, unlike every other county in Ohio, disallow reporters from witnessing the vote tallying?
UPDATE: 11/23/04 Cincinnati Enquirer, the paper which broke the Warren County Lockdown story originally, reports that the county had been planning the action for at least a week prior to the election. Details…
Hi Brad –
I think this does sound pretty suspicious, but I think it would also be useful to know which way Warren County went in the last three or four elections for context before freaking out about a Republican conspiracy. This from someone who completely believes in Republican conspiracies. Any way we could research that information?
Good point, Ann. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to go after that info, but I think it’d likely be available on the net as I recall that the Ohio Sec. of State’s website had a pretty good section on past election totals.
I welcome you to go check it out and let us know what you find. Otherwise, I’m working on a coupla things at once for the moment, but if I get the opportunity to do so, I’ll try to do exactly that as well!
Let us know what you may find!
Not hard to do that. Here’s the results.
In 2000, there were 96,536 regsitered voters, of whom 69,078 voted (71.56% turnout). Excluding third-party votes, 71.62% voted for Bush, and 28.38% voted for Gore.
Using those figures to estimate the correct results for 2004, we can conclude that 438 1/2 votes (to an eery 5 digits of precision), constituting a staggering 0.48% of the total vote, were stolen.
One can only wonder how fraud on such a spectacular scale could be so inefficient, and why a basic fact like this would not be checked by someone who is interested in election fraud.
… speaking as someone who would like to see the Democrats win as much as every other next guy.
How did the exit polls for 2000 compare to "actual" count .
I recall reading that "exit polster" asked voters how they voted in previous elections, surely these numbers would be useful ,if the 2000 results are inconsistent with the 2000 exit polls the .48% is pointless as an example.
Remembering Gore actually won the popular vote in 2000 (had the courts allowed the recount to be finished.)
Also 71.56% turnout in 2000 ,what turnout in 2004.
re #5: I don’t think we will ever know what the turnout was, for the same reason we will never know what the totals were.