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Anti-fracker hints that Youngstown Bill of Rights may have passed in ’14
On the side
It took a while, but the Mahoning County Board of Elections certified to the Nov. 3 ballot a Sunday liquor option for Crickets Bar and Grill in Youngstown.
The board declined Aug. 17 to certify the issue for the bar at 1733 E. Midlothian Blvd., which is Precinct 7G, to serve “spirituous liquor” because it didn’t have enough valid signatures. It needed 88 valid signatures and of the 126 it submitted only 83 were deemed valid. After additional checking, the number of valid signatures grew to 86. It finally got to 89 on Tuesday, the first day of early voting.
Meanwhile, the Canfield Republican Women’s Club is celebrating its 50th anniversary at Avion on the Water, 2177 W. Western Reserve Road in Canfield on Thursday. Cocktail hour starts at 5:30 with dinner an hour later and a panel discussion at 7:30 p.m.
Among those attending are Ohio Supreme Court Justice Sharon L. Kennedy, U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson, and Ohio Rep. Timothy E. Ginter. Columbiana County Republican Chairman Dave Johnson is serving as the master of ceremonies and Mahoning County Republican Chairman Mark Munroe will make an anniversary presentation.
Tickets are $35 and can be obtained by calling 330-531-0120 or email at crwcmail@gmail.com.
The accusation was pretty serious: Something happened during the Nov. 4, 2014, election that altered the results of the Youngstown anti-fracking charter amendment.
Essentially, the fix was in, and a close victory for the amendment somehow turned into a huge defeat, according to Ray Beiersdorfer, a Youngstown State University geology professor who opposes fracking.
Though Beiersdorfer wasn’t specific at first, it certainly sounded as if he were implying that there were people at the Mahoning County Board of Elections who did something improper.
That’s what David Betras, the board’s vice chairman and head of the county Democratic Party, thought after hearing Beiersdorfer at a Tuesday board meeting.
“You just basically accused this board of electionAnti-fracker hints that Youngstown Bill of Rights may have passed in ’14s of election fraud,” Betras said to Beiersdorfer.
Betras said much more, including: “I find it highly offensive you’d accuse me of a crime.”
Mark Munroe, board chairman and head of the county Republican Party, also got the same impression from Beiersdorfer’s comments, saying he found the statements “offensive.”
However, Munroe admitted that when he first got on the board of elections, he was suspicious that Democrats kept winning elections and wondered if something was going on. So, Munroe said, he investigated and found the elections were correct.
If you go back a few decades, there were a number of accusations – some likely legitimate – of questionable practices at the board of elections.
After hearing from Betras and Munroe, Beiersdorfer later said that he didn’t accuse anyone of wrongdoing and that his concern was with the machines that count the paper ballots.
He referred to past voting problems, though those issues were with the board’s electronic machines that they haven’t used in a few years.
To argue that machines changed the outcome of the anti-fracking charter amendment in November 2014 is a stretch.
It was crushed, losing by 15.4 percentage points – 7,323 to 5,373. The number of ballots to be
altered would be about 1,000.
Beiersdorfer believes something improper occurred because of a poll taken of Youngstown voters after they cast ballots that election night.
The poll was done by telephone – most exit polls are done in person – of 675 city voters by Issues & Answers of Virginia Beach, Va.
Randy Younkin of Youngstown, who backs the charter amendment, paid $3,120 to the company for the poll.
The poll showed that of the 476 people who gave an answer, 245 said they voted yes and 231 said they voted no. That’s a win of 2.1 percentage points.
However, 161 people – 23.9 percent of those polled – contacted either refused to disclose their vote or said they didn’t know how they voted. Also, 38 people, 5.6 percent, didn’t vote on the issue.
Younkin questioned the fairness of the election based on the poll.
“It sounds like something went wrong in the counting process,” he said.
What Beiersdorfer and Younkin seem to either be missing or ignoring is a sentence in a brief email from the company included with the poll.
It reads: “Also, as I mentioned on the phone, the high rate of refusing to answer the voting question (approximately 24%) is telling and is likely skewing the results.”
Another issue is 62.7 percent of those polled were women, which isn’t reflective of turnout.
I asked Mark Weaver, one of the state’s most respected and successful political consultants and an amateur comedian, about the results.
“As polls go, the methodology of this one strikes me as very shaky,” he said. “Someone must have been fracking the numbers.”
Beiersdorfer wants a hand count of the ballots on this issue, and said one should have been done in the November 2014 election.
But a hand count last year would have been a waste of time.
Of the four times the anti-fracking charter amendment has been on the ballot, the largest margin of defeat was from last November.
We’ll have to wait until Nov. 3 to find out if the anti-frackers are able to muster enough support to get the charter amendment approved this time.
But one bit of advice: Don’t bother spending money on telephone exit polls.