Activists hope Election Day in Columbus brought more accountability and transparency for the Columbus Division of Police. Columbus city leaders and the county’s newly elected county prosecutor Gary Tyack talk the talk, but will they follow through on promises of investigating and challenging the police when called for? 

Issue 2, establishing a Civilian Review Board (CRB) with oversight over the Columbus police, won in a landslide. The bar for greater police accountability was raised even higher after long-time Republican County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien was defeated by Tyack, a Democrat and the former 10th District Court of Appeals (Franklin County) Court Judge. 

O’Brien’s support for police and the cold, statue-like approach he exudes towards any victims of police is reflected in his record and highly criticized by local activists. During his 20-plus year tenure, only one case of police misconduct – resulted in criminal indictments. This case came from within the VICE unit, as one officer repeatedly abused sex workers, eventually killing one. Yet from 2013 to 2019, Columbus police killed 40 people, 27 of them Black.

“Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Please sit. Thank you. This is without question the latest news conference I’ve ever had. Thank you. I appreciate it very much. And I want to thank the American people for their tremendous support, millions and millions of people voted for us tonight. And a very sad group of people is trying to disenfranchise that group of people and we won’t stand for it. We will not stand for it.”

It’s Wednesday morning. The election is still up for grabs as I write, creating a post-Election Day void of painful proportions. A blue wave didn’t wash over the newly constructed wall around the White House, flush out the least competent president in American history and present the planet with President Joe, the guy who would make it all better.

Stephen Wertheim’s Tomorrow, The World examines a shift in elite U.S. foreign-policy thinking that took place in mid-1940. Why in that moment, a year and a half before the Japanese attacks on the Philippines, Hawaii, and other outposts, did it become popular in foreign-policy circles to advocate for U.S. military domination of the globe?

In school text book mythology, the United States was full of revoltingly backward creatures called isolationists at the time of World War I and right up through December 1941, after which the rational adult internationalists took command (or we’d all be speaking German and suffering through the rigged elections of fascistic yahoos, unlike this evening).

The big news is that the electronic pollbooks in Franklin County, Ohio (Columbus) provided by the vendor KnowInk crashed due to problems uploading data overnight, according to the Franklin County Board of Elections.

Thankfully all polling places had back-up paper pollbooks when I voted this morning. I was checked in the old-fashioned way.

There was some concern that paper sign-in would be slower, but due to record early voting the lines were nonexistent at the Near East side inner-city Ward 55 at mid-morning.

Election integrity activists, including myself, generally favor paper pollbooks over electronic “black box” pollbooks. For one, it is much easier to match your signature with a pen and paper than with a stylus, which might cause a challenge by election workers. Electronic pollbooks are easily hackable, can be programmed with incorrect information that only shows up Election Day, and often go down at inopportune times – like today.