By Brad Friedman from Phoenix, AZ…
With more than 3,000 counties in the United States of America, only heavily Republican Warren County, Ohio — one of the last to report election results in the Buckeye State that night — took action on Election Night 2004 to lock out members of the public and the media from their tabulation room.
The president of the county’s Board of Commissioners claimed at the time that during a “face-to-face meeting between the FBI and our director of emergency services we were informed that on a scale from one to 10…Warren County in particular was rated at 10, 10 being the top highest risk.”
Nobody, however, in Warren County has ever named the supposed FBI official who gave the warning, and to this day, the director of the county’s Department of Emergency Services, Frank R. Young, will not reveal the name of the official with whom he claims he spoke, even as the FBI maintains “there was no information given to Warren County of an imminent terrorist threat to that county or to Southern Ohio,” and that “None of our agents…advised of any type of any terrorist threat or anything like that.”
Additionally, no one has ever been held accountable for what happened.
During The BRAD BLOG’s exclusive interview last December with Ohio’s new Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, she was asked about the infamous Warren County Lockdown and encouraged to investigate the matter to ensure something similar would not be allowed to occur during the 2008 election. She noted that she was still “troubled” by the ’04 incident and “[couldn’t] find any justification for it.”
“We’ll look again at that situation and see what the best course of action is to prevent it from happening in the future,” she promised at the time.
The Cincinnati Enquirer picked up on that section of our interview at the time, and now, going on four years since the Lockdown occurred — first reported by The BRAD BLOG on November 8, 2004 — a mainstream corporate media outlet has finally taken the issue seriously enough to devote some resources to a legitimate investigation.
Jon Craig’s investigative report in Sunday’s Cincinnati Enquirer notes: “Among those locked out were an Enquirer reporter, a TV reporter, and a stringer from the Associated Press.” He goes on to report that “(t)he AP had stringers at all 88 boards of elections, and only in Warren County were they not allowed in.”
Despite a misleading summary early in Craig’s article, asserting the paper has “learned…A casual conversation about terrorism between the county emergency services director and a friendly FBI agent in a parking lot may have been the final trigger for the lockdown,” what’s clear is that to this day, no one from the FBI has ever come forward to substantiate Young’s claims. Even today, while Young is taking responsibility for recommending the lockdown, he’s sticking to his story that it was his conversation with an FBI official — whom he still refuses to name — that led him to his decision.
Both the FBI and the Warren County Sheriff tell Craig that Young’s claims, essentially, are complete bullshit…
On that crucial point, from today’s Enquirer report:
He said it was inspired, in part, by a conversation he had with an FBI agent in October, while planning security for an unrelated public event. That conversation took place in the parking lot of the Hamilton Township Administration Building.
Young asked the FBI agent how seriously to take the threats. The agent – whom Young would not identify – told him: “We take it very seriously. There are factions in this country that want to go after – and see disruption of whatever it is – whether it’s an election or whatever.’’
Young said the conversation “was not necessarily what prompted the actions…We just wanted to have some extra protection around the building, because you never know what kind of a nut is out there.’’
But Warren County Sheriff Tom Ariss has a different recollection of decisions leading to the lockdown: “My understanding is the FBI was never contacted. They never talked to anybody.â€
The FBI looked into whether anyone had told Warren County authorities about a threat to the board of elections, FBI spokesman Michael Brooks said last week.
“We concluded that there was no information given to Warren County of an imminent terrorist threat to that county or to Southern Ohio,’’ Brooks said. “None of our agents did anything wrong (or) advised of any type of any terrorist threat or anything like that.’’
…
In an interview last week, Ariss insisted that Young “would never talk to anybody (from the FBI) in a parking lot, because they wouldn’t know who the hell he was. But I better keep my mouth shut,†he said with a laugh. “I won’t even touch it. Just knowing the FBI, they would have no reason to be up here…Had there been any concern, it should have been addressed to us because we are the provider of security on the county buildings.’’
In other words, Young was then, and continues to be, full of shit. Yet neither he, nor any members of the County Commission, have faced accountability for their decision or for their misleading statements to the media, which led to robbing the public of their ability to monitor the tabulation of their own Presidential Election, in one of the handful of counties where the fully faith-based results, as reported, tipped the scales to give George W. Bush an alleged victory for four more years.
As we must hit the road again this afternoon, we urge you to read Craig’s full report for yourself for additional notable details and documents as collected from interviews, public records requests, and more.
But one more item of note, for the moment, is that even today — even after all of the books and reports on what happened in Ohio, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ’06 report documenting in great detail “How 350,000 Votes Disappeared in Ohio” — representatives of John Kerry’s ’04 campaign still stand by their reprehensibly unforgivable decision not to keep their infamous campaign promise assuring that “every vote will be counted.”
A spokesperson reaffirms that decision in Craig’s article, even though the reported results were so close that a mere 6 votes registered for Kerry instead of Bush in each Ohio precinct would have changed the outcome of the election. The “official” margin of “victory” for Bush in Ohio was just over 118,000 votes.
“Bush still carried the state by a large enough margin that it seems unlikely…that even with all of these errors that Kerry could have won Ohio,” Kerry’s Ohio legal counsel, Cincinnati attorney Daniel J. Hoffheimer, tells the Enquirer today, as many of the same DNC attorneys across the country prepare to “protect” your votes again in 2008.
One of the sleazy practices used by those wishing to engage in election fraud is the late reporting of vote counts in districts over which they have control. The purpose of this is to rig the count according to what has been reported by earlier reporting districts so that they can gauge the number of votes needed on an overall basis for their candidate to win. They will then flip or not count the needed votes to accomplish their goals.
And I don’t want to raise my blood pressure by commenting on that quisling Kerry who had his own agenda or knew what the outcome was supposed to be and went along with it in return for whatever.
The theme song of Warren County, Ohio election officialdumb is “Tell me Lies“. They actually still think that is what the public wants.
When are these friggin dinosaurs going to curl up and turn into oil?
YOu know what I like about Brad Friedman’s reporting? He writes a completely straigtforward journalistic piece to pretty normal MSM standards (standards on a “good day”–the kind we used to see in the Press) and then ends the article with the unquoted expression “complete bullshit”. I love it. Reminds me of Putney Swope advertising.
http://www.geocities.com/electionmodel/OhioConfirmationofKerryLandslide.htm
On December 14, 2007, Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman reported that the Ohio Secretary of State confirmed that the 2004 election could have been stolen : “Ohio’s Secretary of State announced this morning that a $1.9 million official study shows that “critical security failures” are embedded throughout the voting systems in the state that decided the 2004 election. Those failures, she says, “could impact the integrity of elections in the Buckeye State.” They have rendered Ohio’s vote counts “vulnerable” to manipulation and theft by “fairly simple techniques.” Indeed, she says, “the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as tampering with the paper audit trail connector or using a magnet and a personal digital assistant.” In other words, Ohio’s top election official has finally confirmed that the 2004 election could have been easily stolenâ€.
……
“The final official tally for Bush—less than 119,000 votes out of 5.4 million cast—varied by 6.7% from exit poll results, which showed a Kerry victory. Exit polls in 2004 were designed to have a margin of error of about 1%.
In various polling stations in Democrat-rich inner city precincts in Youngstown and Columbus, voters who pushed touch screens for Kerry saw Bush’s name light up. A wide range of discrepancies on both electronic and paper balloting systems leaned almost uniformly toward the Bush camp. Voting procedures regularly broke down in inner city and campus areas known to be heavily Democratic.
In direct violation of standing federal election law, 56 of 88 Ohio counties have since destroyed all or part of their 2004 election data.â€
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Ohio Analytics
The Implausible Final Ohio Exit Poll: matched to a corrupt recorded vote
Kerry won the unadjusted (WPE) Ohio Exit Poll by 54.4-45.6% as well as the 12:22am adjusted Composite (1963 respondents) by 52.1-47.9%.
Bush won the 2:06pm Final Ohio exit poll (2020 respondents) by 50.9-49.1%. Vote shares and weights were adjusted to force a match to the recorded Ohio vote. The Final National Exit poll was also forced to match the recorded National vote. It’s Standard Operating Procedure.
If the 12:22am Ohio exit poll weightings had been used in the Final, it would have been necessary to inflate the Bush vote shares to implausible levels to match the recorded vote. So the weights were adjusted in favor of Bush to minimize the vote share inflation.
First-time Voters
Of the 14% who were first-time voters, 55% were for Kerry. Are we to believe that he won just 47% of the other 86%?
Bush Approval
On Election Day, Bush had an average 48.5% national approval rating (11-polls). In the 12:22am Ohio Exit Poll, the Bush Approval weighting was 51% (Kerry won by 50.1-49.9%). In the Final Ohio Exit Poll, the weighting was increased to 53% in order to force a match to the recorded vote (Bush won by 51.6-47.0%). Using 48.5% Bush approval, Kerry won by 52.3-47.7%, a 270,000 vote margin.
Size of Community
According to the 12:22am Ohio Exit Poll, Kerry won in the Big Cities by 50-49% – but Bush won Big Cities in the Final Exit Poll by 53-43%. Are we supposed to believe that Bush outpolled Kerry by 10% in large, traditionally Democratic urban locations such as Cleveland and Cincinnati?
When Decided
Of the 21% who decided in the month prior to the election, 62% voted for Kerry, compared to just 45% of the 79% who decided earlier. Not plausible. Did Bush lead by 10% in the pre-October polls?
Party ID
The weights changed from 38D/35R to 35D/40R, a 7.9% shift. With the original weights, Bush needed 17% of Democrats to match the recorded vote. He had 8%.
Ideology
Liberal/Conservative weights changed from 21/32 to 19/34, a 9.5% shift. With the original weights, Bush needed 23% of Liberals to match the recorded vote. He had 13%.
Voted for Senate
Democratic/Republican weights changed from 43/57 to 36/64, a 16.3% shift. With the original weights, Bush needed 14% of those who voted for the
Democratic Senate candidate. He had 7%.
Election Models: calculating the True Vote
1) Election Calculator: Kerry won by 54.1-45.9% (1.22% annual voter mortality; 5% uncounted in 2000)
2) True Vote: Kerry won by 51.5-48.5% (0.87% annual mortality; 2.74% uncounted in 2004)
3) Switched Vote: Kerry won by 53.3-46.7% (3% of total votes cast were uncounted; 6.8% switched )
Top of the Morning, all. Keep on driving those snakes out of their hiding places. If the media ever catches up with the people, the roar of exposed injustice will be deafening. Aaaaah, the sweet sound of real change!
My thought about this is, how in the hell that the terrorist knew that warren county would be the final place of tabulation, there were 88 counties and they got lucky and picked warren county, Frank Young is a liar, he know why he close it down, it was only to still the election, its sad that we have a man in the White House that was never elected by the peoples, the first time was when the Supreme Court installed him, and the second time Frank S. Young stoled the votes that put this IDIOT in office, and the price that this country have paid for this is a illigal invasion of Sovereign country, and our economy is in shamble, thanks to criminals whom had their own agenda to break America, who have won, Osama Bin Laden have won because Bush and the Republican party did Osama bidding for him and rack America finance.
Oh yes the reason why Frank S. Young can’t give the FBI agent name, is because there were no agent that told him that, I don’t understand why he have not been under an ivestigation yet, why is this idiot still on the streets for tampering with the elections, until he give a legit reason he should be in prison.