Bonnie and Kevin Parent grew up in Kennedy Township, a place Kevin still remembers as “kind of a tight-knit community.”
But that was before the Parents and others tried to dislodge the name of “Weinstein” from local government. Before federal investigators were called to look into headlines about election irregularities. Before some of the ballots at the center of the controversy disappeared.
All that happened more than 20 years ago. Some of those involved have since died, and no one was charged. Elections in Kennedy have attracted little controversy in the years since.
But even though she and her husband now live part of the year in Florida, Bonnie Parent hasn’t forgotten.
“When [former President Donald] Trump was saying he was going to crack down on voter fraud, I said, ‘He has no idea,’” she recalled. “Because I know what they did in tiny little Kennedy Township.”
And the dispute still resonates in elections this year. It drew in the man who now runs the county’s elections department, as well as then-rookie District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr., who is up for re-election.
It also pitted County Treasurer John Weinstein against attorney Dave Fawcett, both of whom are now among a half-dozen Democrats running for Allegheny County Executive. Among the duties for the winner of that race: serving on the county’s Board of Elections during the 2024 presidential election.
That’s why the story still matters, Fawcett says.
“Democracy depends upon elections that aren’t just fair, but that everybody understands and believes are fair,” he said. Given the distrust Trump has sown in past elections, “If the person leading our board of elections had himself been accused of election fraud, that would be a disaster,” Fawcett said.
In a statement, Weinstein’s campaign called the dispute a decades-old “politically motivated string of falsehoods.” The statement pledged “John will ensure an election process of the highest integrity,” and said Fawcett had “tried to create a story when there is none.”
“We have seen in the last presidential election how false accusations of voter irregularities can taint a legitimate election,” it warned.
‘I’m getting goosebumps’
Located just west of Pittsburgh, Kennedy’s population has swelled to 8,700 people in recent decades. But by the 1990s, there were growing pains.
The Parents were upset about a proposal to build a nursing home near their house. Some in Colleen McMillan’s neighborhood opposed a planned housing development.
“People were concerned about all sorts of things,” said McMillan. “About how much they were paying for garbage, about sewer issues” as the township system struggled to keep pace with growth.
A group of dissidents, including McMillan and the Parents, formed the Kennedy Township Committee for Community Awareness to press their concerns.
But they said they were often frustrated by a government they saw as led by Mel Weinstein, the father of John Weinstein and a powerful figure in his own right. Beginning in the 1970s he’d risen through local politics to head the local Democratic committee and to serve as Kennedy’s tax collector and treasurer. He still holds those roles today, working from the government building that bears his name: the Mel Weinstein Municipal Center.
The KTCCA itself was not a partisan group, but some dissidents ran for office themselves.
“We wanted to see what was going on,” said Bonnie Parent, who in 2001 ran for township commissioner and lost by four votes.
In 1999, a pair of commissioner seats and an auditor’s post were up for grabs, and in heavily Democratic Kennedy, they’d be chosen in the May primary.
The challengers didn’t get close: Candidates endorsed by the local Democratic committee won by hundreds of votes. But McMillan and others suspected the totals were being inflated.
“I heard [about] polling places where they had opened up the absentee ballots before the polling place closed,” McMillan said. That would violate procedure and, she worried, could allow someone to fill in names for races the voter left blank.
McMillan said she’d also heard people talking about “efforts to have individuals get together and forge ballots” before election day. And absentee ballots made up as many as 8 percent of ballots cast in Kennedy — nearly triple the county average.
“Something didn’t seem right,” McMillan said. So she and Bonnie Parent went to the elections office to see the absentee ballots themselves.
“I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about this,” Parent said. Candidate names had been written in different colors of ink on the same ballot, she said, which to her suggested the ballots were altered by multiple people. “Every absentee ballot was just desecrated.”
And the handwriting on some ballots looked the same, McMillan recalled. “Bonnie said, ‘Colleen, why are all these duplicates?’ I said, ‘Bonnie, they’re not.’”
McMillan wrote weeks later about her concerns to the state Attorney General’s office, which passed them along to local election officials. But not everyone saw what she and Parent did. The county’s manager of elections at the time, Mark Wolosik, wrote to Zappala about the matter, but added, “To the layman, it appears there are no substantial similarities” in the handwriting.
In response, Zappala wrote that his office had reviewed materials sent by the elections office relating to Kennedy, but said election staff should seek to “supply our office with more verification of possible criminal activity.” High voter activity is common in contested races, he noted, and “It is not against the law to urge people to vote.”
Similar handwriting could have resulted from efforts to assist voters who needed help, he suggested. And if a poll watcher had seen ballots opened before polls closed, “Was it not her duty to report this to the Election Bureau at the time?”
McMillan said she wasn’t surprised by Zappala’s response, “Because he was the former solicitor in Kennedy Township for six years prior to becoming district attorney.”
Through a campaign spokesman, Zappala declined comment for this story. But he and John Weinstein breezed to their first electoral victories in 1999 — establishing themselves in offices they still hold today. And the Tribune-Review would later report that Mel and John Weinstein had circulated petitions for Zappala’s first run.
Wolosik did chastise poll workers at one precinct for opening votes early, records show. But he later notified McMillan in a letter, “It has been concluded that there was no illegal conduct.”
That’s where it might have ended — were it not for the outcome of elections higher on the 1999 ballot than township commissioner.
‘This one grabbed my attention’
The 1999 election cycle was the first to take place under a new county executive-led form of government, and voters elected Republican Jim Roddey to the county’s new top post.
In May 2000, as Roddey was taking the reins, McMillan addressed a Roddey “transition team” focused on elections and led by Republican attorney Robert Owsiany. She warned of “possible voting irregularities in Kennedy,” where she said absentee ballot use was high, and some ballots were cast by people who lived elsewhere.
The transition team urged an investigation by the three-member county Board of Elections — which includes the county executive and a county council member from each political party. The elections board hired Owsiany in 2002 to review election materials from the previous five years.
Fawcett, who was then the Republican county councilor on the elections board, said he’d previously heard of isolated “one-offs” when it came to voting irregularities.
“But this one grabbed my attention,” he said. “I understood that if true, it’d be a serious crime.”
And Owsiany’s 29-page report to the board, which included 50 pages of exhibits, concluded in September 2002 that there was “a very substantial body of documentary evidence to support the allegations of absentee ballot vote fraud … over the past five years” in Kennedy. He made special mention of Mel and John Weinstein.
Owsiany had retained a Pittsburgh handwriting expert, Michelle Dresbold, to review ballots cast in Kennedy from four elections. His report said she found that in the 1997 fall election, 56 of 177 absentee ballots showed “a substantial likelihood that many were not voted by separate individuals.” Of those, she judged “within a high degree of professional certainty” that 28 were completed by Mel Weinstein. Another five “may have been written by John Weinstein” — though she said she’d need additional handwriting samples to be sure. Ten more ballots showed aspects of both men’s handwriting, she said.
Owsiany also said he spoke to people who alleged “the Democratic organization” in Kennedy encouraged voters — even those who didn’t live in the community — to request absentee ballots. They would “sign the declaration envelope [in which ballots are returned] and simply return the entire blank absentee ballots and other materials to the organization” to complete.
Owsiany’s report acknowledged he couldn’t prove those claims: “The board should either continue the investigation,” he urged, “or turn this investigation over to law enforcement.”
‘A hired gun’
Mel Weinstein did not return calls to his home or office, though his wife said the dispute, which she called a “terrible thing,” had been closed years ago.
But from the outset, John Weinstein seized on the fact that Owsiany had been the solicitor for the county’s Republican Party. (He also represented Parent and some other residents who challenged election results in 2001.) Weinstein called the report a “political lynching”in 2002, and told WESA Owsiany was “a hired gun.”
“The Owsiany investigation was the antithesis of independent,” his campaign said.
Owsiany could not be reached for comment. But Fawcett said he was chosen because of his “experience as an election-law specialist, a real speciality that few lawyers have. The report speaks for itself.”
The board’s “duty was to investigate and report fraud. We did,” Fawcett added. “There was nothing political about it.”
A month after the report’s release, Zappala recused himself from the matter, and called on the state Attorney General’s office to look into it. There were also signs the FBI was interested.
In a May 2002 letter to his supervisor, Wolosik reported an agent from the FBI had interviewed elections staff about “a possible Federal Grand Jury Investigation regarding Kennedy Township.” The agent, he said, “related that the scope of his investigation included, but was not limited to, election-related matters.”
No charges were filed at the state or federal level, and the controversy disappeared from headlines in late 2002.
“It was frustrating,” said Fawcett. “We knew it was serious, [and] we dug into it in every which way we did. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
“[D]espite the best efforts of [Republicans] to trump up claims, no official action was ever taken, and no votes were disallowed,” the Weinstein campaign said.
But while no ballots were cast out, some of them were thrown away — apparently before they could be reviewed by state or federal authorities. They were the very 1999 ballots that Parent says still give her goosebumps.
‘This was potential evidence’
As he began his inquiry, Owsinary reported, “the elections division discovered that … it could not readily locate the documents from the May 1999 Kennedy Township municipal primary” — despite earlier assurances that they had been saved due to the controversy.
Wolosik, who died in 2019, wrote then that there was high turnover among staff repsonsible for ballots, and officials determined “[i]t is most likely that these records were inadvertently destroyed” in a routine purge.
That explanation has never satisfied McMillan. “This was potential evidence in a criminal investigation,” she said. “And somehow it all ends up missing. How does that happen?”
Owsiany’s report noted that the “bin room,” where ballots were stored in the County Office Building Downtown, “is not ordinarily a secure area. Individuals, especially county officials, can easily gain access.”
Owsiany said election worker Dave Voye, who’d worked in the bin room during the time the ballots were set aside, originally told him records from Kennedy dating back to 1997 were being stored together.
Two months later, though, he said Voye told him that what he’d meant was “the 1999 documents were still on the shelves” with other unchallenged ballots.
“Mr. Voye has altered his original story,” Owsiany concluded.
Today, Voye is the head of the county’s elections department. He calls the disappearing ballots “an unfortunate situation.”
“I wish I knew exactly what happened — when they were thrown out and who threw them out,” he said. “I cannot unscramble that egg.”
Voye agreed security in the bin room was lax, and that someone could have stolen the records. But he said he believed accidental destruction was more likely.
As for Owsiany’s report, “I do not recall changing my story,” he said. “I may have tried to offer different solutions — trying to think back to what could have happened.”
Voye’s wife works for Weinstein in the county treasurer’s office, and Voye acknowledges she did at the time, when the two were dating.
“I can have a personal relationship with my wife and a professional relationship with Mr. Weinstein,” he said. “Those two do not mix.”
‘Our elections are more secure than they’ve ever been’
Voye said some of the conduct alleged to have taken place back then couldn’t happen today.
For one thing, mailed-in ballots are no longer counted at polling places but at a central warehouse. They are locked away and under constant video surveillance until election day, and old ballots are now more clearly marked with the dates on which they are to be destroyed.
“Our elections are more secure than they’ve ever been,” Voye said.
But voter distrust is growing. That’s especially true of mail-in ballots, which became far more common after a 2019 overhaul of state voting laws. A recent Franklin & Marshall College poll found that just over half of Pennsylvania voters — and fewer than one in four Republicans — are “confident” the vote would be counted correctly if mail-in ballots were widely used.
Bethany Hallam is running for reelection to her county council seat, which comes with a spot on the elections board. She was in elementary school at the time of the Kennedy controversy, but while she has political ties to Weinstein, she said election integrity is bigger than any one person.
“That’s why the board has three members — to provide checks and balances,” she said.
It might take more than that to ease Colleen McMillan’s mind.
“Although it may be 20 years since this happened, it’s very fresh in my mind,” she said. For two days a year while the polls are open, “We are all equal. And they took that away.”
