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Hackwell’s Millions Deserve Ethics Probe

How did J. Kenneth Hackwell become a “multimillionaire” while a public official?

In 1998, the Akron Beacon Journal reported that Hackwell, then state treasurer, was also listed as “manager, officer and director of Blue Chip Broadcasters Ltd.” This limited partnership owned and operated six radio stations in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.

According to legend – or better, spin – four black investors from Cincinnati, Ross Love, Penguin Painters owner Lovie Ross, Hackwell, and Cincinnati attorney Kalvin Buford, scraped together $500,000 to save WIZF-FM, a black-owned Cincinnati radio station that was facing bankruptcy in late 1992. Of more interest is how this group of four investors secured a $1.5 million investment from Blue Chip Venture Company as well as a $2.6 million loan from three Cincinnati banks – Fifth Third, Providence and Star. The reality is that the banks were more likely investing in the new Ohio state treasurer, Hackwell, not in four minority investors with no real experience in radio and telecommunications. Read more

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New Warren County, Ohio Election Fraud Evidence To Be Released On Wednesday

On Wednesday morning, April 19, 2006, there will be a historic press conference at the law office I share with a voting rights attorney Cliff Arnebeck. An explosive announcement will be made involving election fraud in Ohio. Also at the press conference will be Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips, who is working with Ohio Honest Elections to document the voting irregularities and fraud in the 2004 and 2004 elections in Ohio. He will be discussing his recent examination of the ballots from Warren County’s 2004 presidential election.

Remember, Warren County called its own Level 10 Homeland Security emergency alert on Election Day 2004 and diverted the ballots to an unauthorized warehouse. Two Warren County election workers told the Free Press that a Republican operative oversaw the ballots. One of his intriguing findings was predicted in the Free Press early on, suggesting that ballots would be found punched only for George W. Bush. In precinct 128, someone even punched the pink “Header Card” for Bush and Warren County officials counted it in their total. In other counties, the pink Header Card serves only to identify the precinct for the central tabulator.

Dr. Phillips also found a ballot in precinct 155 that contained punch holes in all four precincts studied, with odd numbered punches for president. According to election officials, this would not have been possible if the card was punched in the voting machine. For example, voters could only punch every other odd number on the ballot for president, but he found ballots with double votes for president, including a vote in an even-numbered space. The only conclusion that Dr. Phillips could come up with is that these were unauthorized, hasty and incorrect “attempts to punch ballots for Bush” by hand outside of the machine. In short, Dr. Phillips argues that this is proof of “old fashioned ballot stuffing.”

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Understanding Hackwell’s Right Wing Agenda

J. Kenneth Blackwell is a perfect neocon. He preaches fiscal responsibility while the budget at his office grows dramatically. He quotes Martin Luther King, Jr., yet he works for the anti-affirmative action, anti-civil rights corporate-sponsored Heritage Foundation. He talks about equality for all, but one of his key aides, Sherri Dembinski, third in charge of his office — which, by the way, oversees the chartering of nonprofit organizations — receives income and gifts from the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) charter school. ECOT is the largest charter school in the state.

The Akron Beacon Journal reported that managers of ECOT donated $330,000 to Ohio Republicans. If you wonder where they got that kind of money, in 2002 ECOT was caught by auditors at the Department of Education overcharging the state of Ohio as much as $7 million for children who cannot be verified as being on their school rolls. Dembinski serves on the board of ECOT, and Hackwell, of course, oversees the reporting of campaign contributions in the state.

After public scrutiny came upon Hackwell and Dembinski, she resigned and moved into a new role as vice president of an ECOT-related foundation that benefits students and organizations affiliated with the school.

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Katrina Victims Deserve Right to Vote

The civil rights movement is alive and well in New Orleans.  On April 1st, thousands of people marched across the Crescent City Connection Bridge to support the right of displaced New Orleans citizens to vote in the election scheduled April 22.  In a symbolic action that mirrored the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama that generated a nationwide groundswell of support for the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, the “March for Our Right to Return, Vote and Rebuild” in New Orleans was designed to ensure that the displaced residents of New Orleans are not disenfranchised and that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is protected.

Marchers also supported the right to return home for those scattered in 44 states across the nation, as well as a priority to be given to “Katrina survivors” when jobs, contracts and training opportunities are dispensed along the Gulf Coast.

The main reason for the protest, led by Rev. Jess Jackson and others, is the city’s upcoming April 22nd election, which currently excludes two-thirds of the voters who formerly lived in New Orleans. The election has been pre-cleared by state officials and the U.S. Department of Justice, even though voters do not know who is running for office and those seeking office do not know how to communicate with the voters. Organizers of the April 1st event want the Secretary of State and Attorney General’s office to provide the public and candidates an updated voter list, including the FEMA list of Katrina survivors scattered across the nation.   Not to do so, they contend, would amount to a “public election with secret voter rolls,” which is a clear a violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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Blackwell: Just Another Crazed Neocon

So, Florida Governor Jeb Bush endorsed Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Hackwell for governor. After all, they were very close in the year 2000, when Hackwell was described as the Bush family’s “secret weapon” when the well-known political crime family stole the 2000 election. As more and more revelations come forward regarding the criminal nature of this White House, Hackwell’s ties become more apparent.

The AP reported yesterday that the phone jamming efforts in the 2002 election in New Hampshire, when Republicans jammed the Democratic “Get Out The Vote” phone lines, are linked to the White House. Republican operative James Tobin, recently convicted in the phone jamming scheme, made two dozen calls to the White House in the three day period surrounding Election Day 2002.

You can bet that Rove was at the other end of those calls. That’s the same Rove Hackwell is reported to have met with on Election Day 2004 in Ohio. What also occurred in Ohio prior to Election Day were the activities of the Mighty Texas Strike Force, a dirty tricks squad linked directly to the White House as well. Hackwell did nothing to stop the voter intimidation in Ohio and, in fact, aided and abetted those criminal activities.

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J. Kenneth Hackwell’s Hypocrisy

The latest revelation regarding the single most unprincipled man in the history of Ohio politics, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Hackwell, is that the man who stole the 2004 election will no longer talk to Columbus Dispatch reporters. Hackwell, the frontrunner in the May 2 gubernatorial primary, won’t talk to a newspaper that hasn’t endorsed a Democrat for president since 1916.

There’s reasons why he won’t talk. Hackwell’s crafted an image of himself as a pious Christian man of the highest moral values. While soliciting the state’s theocrats and right-to-lifers’ vote, he privately holds stock in Barr Pharmaceuticals that manufactures a morning-after pill – or as Hackwell and his followers call it, a baby-killing abortion pill. While he’s opposed to gambling, he’s “shocked,” shocked, I say, that he found himself holding stock in the nation’s largest maker of slot machines. As Ohio’s chief election officer, he decides whether the signatures will be valid for the two casino initiatives attempting to be placed on the November ballot.

He was equally shocked to find that, while negotiating unbid contracts on Dieblod machines, he happened to hold stock in that company as well.

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Separation of Church and State in Ohio

On April 6th, fifty-three Ohio ministers filed a supplemental complaint with Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Mark W. Everson against the World Harvest Church of Canal Winchester, Ohio and the Fairfield Christian Church of Lancaster, Ohio. They allege the obvious, that “The churches have continued to organize and host political rallies featuring one, and only one, Ohio gubernatorial candidate — J. Kenneth Blackwell.”

Blackwell, as the chief elections officer in the state, has worked directly with Rev. Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church and Pastor Russell Johnson of the Fairfield Christian Church to destroy the separation of church and state. Parsley plans to do “Ohio for Jesus” radio spots for his Reformation Ohio project featuring Blackwell.

Rev. Parsley and Blackwell went on a bus tour together during the fall of 2004, to promote a state constitutional amendment against all forms of domestic partnership and gay marriage, which appeared on the ballot as Issue One. Blackwell, according to the tour’s information, would privately “minister” to voters prior to the rallies. He also ran the Issue One initiative out of his Secretary of State’s office. He was censured for that activity. Read more

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2004 Recount Indictments

The April 5 indictment of three top election officials in Cuyahoga County signals the unraveling of the biggest crime in the 21st century — the blatant theft of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. While Michael Vu, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Director, whines about how his staffers are being unfairly treated, the quotes from Special Prosecutor Kevin Baxter describe clearly the criminal activities of Vu’s people.

Baxter told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “If it didn’t balance [the hand count], they excluded those precincts.” Under Ohio law, the Green and Libertarian Party candidates were entitled to a “random” recount. That means that every ballot has an equal chance of inclusion in the initial 3% hand count. Only in Ken Blackwell and Michael Vu’s world does random mean its exact opposite — nonrandom. You can’t pick up a precinct, count it, and if it doesn’t match the official tally, toss it back and find one that does. That’s a crime. Read more

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Blackwell, Diebold, and Campaign 2006

The common statewide wisdom is that “Ken Blackwell will never lose an election in which he is in charge of the vote count.” But Ohio Democrats never seriously questioned Blackwell’s rigged 2004 vote count that put Bush back in the White House.

An eyewitness ally of Blackwell told a small gathering of Bush supporters, with a Free Press reporter present, that Blackwell was in a frenzy on Election Day 2004, writing percentages and vote totals on maps of rural Republican counties, attempting to figure out how many votes, real or manufactured, Bush would need to overcome the exit poll results in Cleveland and Columbus. Read more

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Blackwell’s Letter from Franklin County Jail

All along, J. Kenneth Blackwell has been engaging in criminal activity.

He’s responsible for the purging of over 300,000 voters in Ohio between the 2000 and 2004 election, telling voters they were registered on the wrong paper weight, not counting votes cast in the wrong precinct after he had the precincts switched, and stealing the election in Ohio.

He could always count on the Bush boys to bail him out. But now what? He’s caught dead to rights with an unlawful interest in a public contract.

Remember, Blackwell bragged about negotiating the “best in the nation” deal with Diebold. It wasn’t hard, since Wally O’Dell was one of the president’s Pioneer and Ranger team members. Read more

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