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Comment by theNJR | Hacker News Reader

"Under state law, the identities of those who nominated the land for oil and gas drilling are confidential"

Gotta love it.

On top of that, at least 900 people had their identities stolen and attached to forged pro-fracking letters that were used by the commission to justify allowing fracking.

According to the article, the commission knows, and will delete the forged letters from the public record, but apparently won't take use complaints as a reason to reconsider their decision.

Doesn’t FOIA work here? Government should not be allowed to work in the shadows. And no, this is not a national security issue.

Freedom of information explicitly excludes information confidential at the time of request.

Why? Either there is oil there or not. The geologic evidence can be evaluated without any knowledge of who conducted the research.

If it’s a politician and you dislike this, you may want to vote them out.

> A Cleveland.com investigation in September found that over a hundred Ohio residents said their names were attached to form letters sent to the commission in a public comment period without their knowledge — all of them urging state parks allow fracking.

> Those names included a 9-year-old girl and a blind woman. The form letter, which appears over 1,000 times in the public comment database, urges Ohio to “responsibly” lease rights to minerals under Salt Fork State Park, among other areas.

> The 9-year-old’s mother, Brittany Keep, told Cleveland.com that her daughter knows nothing about oil and gas exploration and neither of them have visited Salt Fork State Park.

Politicians enabling fraud. The members of the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission are public record, journalists should dig deep. All available evidence points to bad faith actions and sidestepping the will of local citizens for oil and gas interests attempting to ram this through.

Last time it was nuclear power plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

Cleveland.com's editors tend to be tools [0] for the same right wing that supports this stuff, and it forced out all its unionized journalists a few years ago, [1] so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for "deep" reporting on this. I guess we can hope a small, underfunded, more independent paper in the state might do something with it.

[0] https://www.ideastream.org/2014-11-04/the-only-video-of-kasi...

[1] https://prospect.org/labor/busting-the-guild-in-cleveland/

I messaged ProPublica.

Ah. That’s a great idea.

It can be difficult and in some cases impossible to vote out bad politicians under first-past-the-post elections. Too many people run against them, splitting the votes such that the bad incumbent wins. This is why I advocate for electoral reform, as not much will get better without it.

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