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Case Study Document

Briefing Book (Section 0 only)

The data integrity rules: confidence tags on every fact, trusted sources, and a registry of wrong claims that AI research tools kept reintroducing, including one labeled "verified."

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Excerpt note. The full briefing book is an internal campaign document of about 12,000 words: county facts, figures, the race, the ballot, and prepared answers, each tagged with a confidence level. Only Section 0, the data integrity rules, is shared here. Sections 1 through 15 are [redacted].

This is the single source of truth for county facts. Nothing here should be spoken publicly without checking the confidence tag on the claim.

0. Data integrity rules. Read this first, every time.

Multiple Delaware Counties exist in the United States. Ohio, Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Oklahoma all have one. Web searches, aggregator sites, and AI research tools routinely return the wrong state's data for county-level queries. This campaign has been burned repeatedly.

Confidence tags:

  • [V] Verified against a Delaware County, Ohio primary or credible Ohio source. Safe to say publicly.
  • [V?] Verified in substance, but refresh the exact figure before publication.
  • [U] Unverified. Do not state as fact. Ask it as a question or leave it out.
  • [X] Known wrong. Never use.

Domain rules:

  • Ohio county government: co.delaware.oh.us. Commissioners' journals are posted here and are the primary source for any resolution.
  • Ohio elections: vote.delawarecountyohio.gov
  • Ohio sheriff: sheriff.co.delaware.oh.us or delawarecountysheriff.com
  • Indiana sheriff: delawarecountysheriff.org (Muncie, 765 area code). Never cite it. Never accept a figure that traces to it, even when a research tool labels it verified.
  • Other reliable Ohio sources: regionalplanning.co.delaware.oh.us (DCRPC), engineer.co.delaware.oh.us, dctaohio.com (Township Association), delcotransit.com, morpc.org, ccao.org, puco.ohio.gov, codes.ohio.gov
  • Ohio local news: delgazette.com, delawaresource.com, 1808delaware.com, WOSU, 10TV, NBC4, Columbus Dispatch

The retired claims registry

Every one of these has appeared in campaign materials. None may be reintroduced under any framing.

  1. [X] "Jail built for 120, houses 260 to 300." Delaware County, Indiana, from delawarecountysheriff.org.
  2. [X] "Opioid settlement: $422,016 received, $0 spent." Delaware County, New York. Never cite any specific opioid dollar figure for this county.
  3. [X] "19 townships." There are 18. The 19 comes from Washington Township, which has land inside Delaware County but is a Franklin County township. The Census treats its Delaware County portion as a separate subdivision.
  4. [X] A misspelled name for the County Engineer. A research pass invented a plausible-sounding wrong surname. Check every official's name against the county directory.
  5. [X] A road project placed in the wrong township. It is in a neighboring township, not the candidate's own.
  6. [X] "Commissioners do not appoint the Board of Developmental Disabilities." They appoint 5 of 7 under ORC 5126.021.
  7. [X] "A 300% density increase." Going from roughly 1.1 to 1.35 units per acre up to 1.8 to 2.2 is an increase of about 35% to 100%.
  8. [X] "Meta's Prometheus one-gigawatt data center is in Ohio." It is in Richland Parish, Louisiana.
  9. [X] "Jail original design capacity around 60 beds." Introduced in a withdrawn draft. Unsourced.
  10. [X] "Donations to this campaign qualify for Ohio's $50 political contribution tax credit." The credit (ORC 5747.29) does not apply to county commissioner races, confirmed with the campaign treasurer. The candidate used the line at events and retired it.
  11. [X] A wrong name for the county Finance Director. Corrected against the commissioners' published agenda.

Retired framings

These are not false facts. They are lines the campaign has chosen to stop using, each with an approved replacement. They get reintroduced for the same reasons the [X] claims do, so check this list too.

  1. "No countywide comprehensive plan since 1994," and every variant. The underlying fact is real, but the line was retired in July 2026 on a former commissioner's advice, because the townships and the regional planning commission have done real planning work since, and the line costs credibility with the people who did it. Use instead: the county's 18 townships, cities, and villages each plan separately, and a shared growth forecast gives everyone one set of numbers to plan against. Frame it as improving existing work, never as filling a void.
  2. "The fastest-growing county in Ohio," stated flat. Debatable. Use instead: "one of the fastest-growing counties in Ohio and the country."
  3. "I am your commissioner." He is not one yet. Use instead: "I want to be your commissioner" or "I'm your candidate for commissioner." Ohio election law restricts using the title of an office a candidate does not hold.
  4. [Redacted: a framing about a legal settlement, replaced with more precise language.]
  5. Impact fees and "guarantee." Ohio counties cannot levy impact fees, and "growth pays for itself" is a principle, never a guarantee.

A caution about research tools and rewrites. In September 2026 an automated research pass was explicitly instructed to guard against cross-state contamination. It returned the Indiana jail figures, labeled them VERIFIED, cited the Indiana domain, and warned against that same domain elsewhere in its own output. A September 11 briefing draft was built without consulting the existing files and reintroduced three claims that a July correction pass had already retired. Then version 3 of this book reintroduced the 1994 line after it had been retired in July. The lessons: tooling reproduces these errors even when told not to, and any new document must be checked against the existing files and the retired lists before it replaces anything.

[Sections 1 through 15 redacted.]

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