Lying happens all the time in 2018, often for political gain or just personal amusement, but ask any lawyer or good con artist and they’ll tell you that the last kind of lie you want to tell is one where the revelation of said lie is inevitable. Stitch it on a pillow, Grandma — it’s as true as Spandau Ballet.
Green the Vote, the recreational marijuana advocacy group that was gathering signatures for State Question 797 to be placed on the November ballot, found this out the hard way when two board members upwardly adjusted the number of signatures the group had gathered.
According to Tulsa World, board members Isaac Caviness and Dody Sullivan hatched a plan to inflate the number of names on the petition to demonstrate success and encourage more reticent ganja-curious voters to jump on the 4:20 Express to Sativaville before it leaves Sticky Icky Station. On July 29, Green the Vote announced that it had gathered 132,527 signatures — a damned precise number and exactly 8,527 more names than it needed to submit to the Oklahoma Secretary of State’s office, or about the same number of joints smoked backstage during the recent 311 concert.
Well, the ruse lasted a little over a week. On Aug. 6, with just 48 hours to go before the petition deadline, Tulsa World reported that Sullivan found north on her “moral compass” and admitted that Green the Vote only had somewhere between 73,000 and 78,000 signatures — a damned imprecise range, somewhere between 47,000 and 52,000 less than the initiative petition required. Green the Vote turned in its insufficient number of signatures on Wednesday. Chicken-Fried News acknowledges the difficulty of finding north on a moral compass, mainly because none of the moral compasses we found on Amazon had navigation points on them, just stuff like “honor” and “truthfulness.”
Honestly, how did Caviness and Sullivan think that inflating the number would help? Everything CFN knows about human nature points to potential signatories just not worrying about it if Green the Vote had collected a surplus of names and SQ797 was in the bag. Maybe Green the Vote should hire a group of straightedge punks and Mormons to run their next campaign — clearer heads might prevail.
