Pot law backers inflated numbers

The campaign gathering signatures to put recreational marijuana on the ballot grossly inflated publicly reported totals in recent weeks, casting doubt on whether there will be enough signatures to advance.

Green the Vote volunteers posted a video on the group’s Facebook page late Monday night detailing how supporters, and the public, were misled.

Dody Sullivan, who said she resigned from Green the Vote’s board a week ago, said the signature count for State Question 797 on July 31 was 31,244, drastically short of the roughly 124,000 needed to put it on the ballot. In the same video, Tulsa chapter leader Ashley Mullen-Lowry said when she was last in the office Saturday, there were just over 73,000 signatures but she added there were still many petition forms from the Oklahoma City area waiting to be submitted.

However, in the last signature count update before the fiasco became public, Green the Vote President Isaac Caviness told the Tulsa World that the petition had exceeded the minimum number of signatures required to get the issue on the ballot with 132,537 already in the office and counted.

The signatures are due in the secretary of state’s office on Wednesday.

“I am the person who counted the stuff that came through the door,” Sullivan said in the now-deleted video posted on Green the Vote’s Facebook page. “The numbers that I counted were not the numbers you were given, and for me, that’s the rub. That’s where I’m having a really difficult time with this.”

Caviness failed to respond to multiple attempts by The Oklahoman to reach him throughout the day Monday but posted a video on his personal page Tuesday to address the allegations. He said the numbers he reported were estimates, even though he presented them as a hard count.

At first, he said, the numbers coming back into the office were low.

“There was a decision that was made strictly between Dody and I to estimate what we believed the numbers to be and put it out there as the hard number,” Caviness said. “Up until about a week or so ago, I had no idea how much the numbers were off.”

The latest hard count,

he said put State Question 797 at 78,000 signatures.

Caviness said the misreporting wasn’t done in a malicious way, but rather to keep the momentum going. Eventually, however, Caviness said Sullivan did another hard count of signatures in the office at the end of July and realized how low the numbers were.

“She panicked. She bailed on us, and she left Green the Vote high and dry,” he said.

In Sullivan’s video, which was posted on the original Green the Vote Facebook page, Sullivan sat with Mullen-Lowry and board member Jamie Nall. Both Sullivan and Nall are no longer listed as board members on Green the Vote’s website.

When Nall found out that the reported numbers were so different from the real numbers, she kicked Caviness off Green the Vote’s Facebook page and shut it down, seemingly without his knowledge. In response, he created a second page for the campaign, Green the Vote 2018, to use as a temporary replacement until he could again gain control.

Nall said she shut down the Facebook page because she “didn’t want any more lies spread.”

Sullivan said that she expected Caviness to fudge the numbers a bit to drive enthusiasm about the campaign and urge people to both continue signing the petition and keep their hopes up.

Green the Vote also is collecting signatures to put a medical marijuana state question on the ballot that would make it part of the state constitution. With the same requirements

as the recreational cannabis petition, State Question 796 only had 42,624 signatures as of her last count, Sullivan said.

“(Caviness) just said whatever it was he wanted. He threw a number out there regardless of the consequences to my conscience, to his conscience,

to the fact that you were all out there busting your butts to get this done and thinking that we were so much further ahead than we actually were,” said a visibly shaken Sullivan, who apologized for her role in the misleading reports.

Caviness also apologized and offered his resignation

but later decided to remain with the group until signatures are handed in Wednesday afternoon. Caviness remained optimistic Tuesday about recreational marijuana’s chances, saying there were still many petitions being circulated by individuals and businesses that hadn’t yet been

handed over to the campaign.

“I truly, from Day One all the way until now, believe we have the signatures,” Caviness said. “I absolutely believe as the rest of these stores get cleared over the next two days, there is a strong possibility we have enough signatures.”