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                                                                                                                Rainer Langstedt

SO WHAT IS WRONG WITH LETTING THE SCHOOL ESTABLISHMENT RUN A PUBLIC VOTE ON THE MERGER?

1) The school establishment is counting the votes.
      Fifteen votes disappeared  in the 2001 building vote.   A person employed by the school district was observed working on a voting machine during the vote. The district said afterwards that he was repairing the machine. No one had recorded what the vote tally was before and after the handling of the voting machine!

2) They have, in the past ignored the result.    
      Less than half of the people voted for the 2001 project, yet it was declared that the project had passed.

ONE VOTE, THREE RESULTS

  1. Board President James Loomis wrote in the Random Harvest that the 2001  building passed with "657 in favor to 353 opposed." After howls from the public Random Harvest ran a correction in the following issue. This time the vote was a lot closer; the winning margin had shrunk to only 4 votes.
  2. I called the district office the day after the vote. My call was prompted by rumors of votes having disappeared in the voting machine repair incident. The district office line was that there had been a total of 1310 voters. With 653 votes opposed and 673 for, the school put out a voting result where everything seemed to be in order.
  3. The list of the voters is a public record. When the voters were counted, the original claim of 1310 voters did not hold up. There were now 44 absentee ballots and 1281 signatures of voters totaling 1325 voters. Therefore we have 15 votes that disappeared in this version. One half of 1281 voters would be 663. The "yes" side only got 657 votes, so less than half of the voters voted for the project.

Can anyone else sense an odor here?

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