By Benjie Cooper
IG: @nuglifenews
YouTube: Lucid’s Vlog
Green the Vote (GTV), the group behind a pair of cannabis legalization initiatives in Oklahoma recently announced that they had collected 132,527 signatures for SQ797, and 115,123 for SQ796. Each is required to have at least 124,000 valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
But in a thirteen-and-a-half minute video posted to the GTV Facebook page Monday evening, three members from the group admit to drastically inflating the numbers to, allegedly, help generate interest in their initiatives. The video has since been removed from the page.
At the time that the group posted the original graphic that showed the numbers to Facebook, SQ797 only had 31,244 signatures, and SQ796 had 42,624.
“Back at the very beginning, and what we learned with the first petition, was that in the beginning it’s okay to fudge the numbers a little bit because it gets people motivated, gets them excited to get out there, to be part of what’s happening,” said Dody Sullivan who first joined the group in 2015. “So that kind of happened with this one like it happened with the last one. The last one, we caught up to ourselves,”
“This one,” she trailed. “We aren’t…we are not caught up. The numbers that have been spoken are not even close to what is in the office. It’s a big lie.”
The group’s president, Isaac Caviness says the group hadn’t gathered very many signatures early on in the campaign, so they decided to inflate the numbers to help give the initiative some momentum.
“We did not mean this in any kind of malicious way, we felt like we were estimating very close,” Caviness told KFOR, admitting he was sideswiped by the video. “I should not have told you that these were hard numbers. I should have told you all that these were estimates.”
According to Caviness, GTV currently has 78,000 signatures for SQ797 with more on the way, but the group only has until Wednesday, August 8 to reach the goal of 124,000.
