Op-Ed: Proposition 37 — possible that election fraud made it fail

Digital Journal
Anne Sewell

It seems there were significant “irregularities” in the vote totals for Proposition 37, the ballot initiative to label genetically engineered foods, that could not be explained by random coincidence.

On election day, November 6, Proposition 37 - the ballot initiative for mandatory labeling of food with GMO content - failed by a narrow margin. With 4,277,985 people voting "yes" (47.9%) and 4,835,045 people voting "no" (53.1%), it was very close. Since then, some rumors have been going around about possible election fraud. Food Democracy Now!, one of the groups involved in Prop 37 has been closely monitoring the results as they came in, and they hadn't seen any credible reports of voting irregularities, that is up until now.

On Thursday, Food Democracy Now! received some very disturbing news from a voter integrity monitor. This monitor claims that possible "statistical anomalies" had been detected in 9 counties in California.

Francois Choquette, a statistician closely involved in monitoring incoming election results in California, said there were significant “irregularities” in the vote totals for Prop 37 that could not be explained by random coincidence.

Since then, a team of independent statisticians has started analyzing raw voter data or “preliminary data from 17 of California's 58 counties”.

So far, potential anomalies have been detected in a number of the largest precincts in Orange, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Alameda and San Diego counties, among others. While it is not definite that election fraud has actually taken place, it is important for Prop 37 supporters to be aware that the results of the election as they stand are not final. Food Democracy Now! is asking supporters to stand with them as they call for further inquiry into the questionable patterns being revealed.

By visiting this web page, you can join in standing for open and transparent elections and ask the California Secretary of State, Debra Bowen, to ensure that the election results from Prop 37 are properly counted.

Today, Friday December 7th is the day that county election officials in the state of California are required to report their final results to the Secretary of State’s office . According to state law, Secretary of State Debra Bowen has until December 14th to certify the results of the election.

Here is where the worry arises. On election night, the California Secretary of State’s office called the election for the No side, declaring that Yes on 37 to label genetically engineered foods had failed to pass by a margin of 46.9% to 53.1%, with some 4.3 million Californians having been reported voting Yes on 37 by the next morning.

However, since that date the ballot proposition has slowly and steadily advanced both its vote total, and also the percentage of the total vote.

As of Monday, December 3rd at 4:58 pm, the California Secretary of State’s office reported that Prop 37 had garnered 48.5% votes to the No side’s 51.5%, with 5,986,652 voting to Label GMOs and 6,365,236 Californians voting against.

The very next morning, according to the California Secretary of State’s website, the Yes on 37 campaign had received 6,004,628 votes and edged down to 48.4% of the vote total. The timestamp on the website showed December 4, 2012, 6:04 a.m.

This was an important milestone, as the Yes on Prop 37 side had gained six million votes, a significant achievement. Food Democracy Now! immediately shared the good news via Twitter @food_democracy at 8:40 am PST.

Organic Consumers Association Statement On California Prop 37 Uncounted Votes

Organic Consumers Association
Katherine Paul
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Organic Consumers Association Katherine Paul, 207.653.3090,

FINLAND, Minn. - Nov. 12, 2012 - The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) is monitoring the ongoing vote count and election results for Prop 37, the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act. The OCA will contest the vote if results differ substantially from pre-election poll results or if there are reports of any voting irregularities, particularly in Orange and San Mateo Counties where paperless ballot systems make voting more vulnerable to fraud.

Prop 37 was defeated by 6 percentage points, 53% to 47%, according to the California Secretary of State on election night. However, as with every election, not every ballot had been counted as of midnight Nov. 6. On election night, there were still 3.3 million uncounted votes. As of November 11, the vote totals were 5,205,044 NO to 4,619,580 YES

"The OCA, along with the California Right to Know Campaign and its attorneys, are closely monitoring the ongoing vote count process," said Ronnie Cummins, Director of the OCA and OCF, which contributed more than $1 million to the Prop 37 campaign. "We will challenge the outcome if the final count indicates more YES than NO votes, or if the results are substantially different from our pre-election polls."

State law requires county elections officials to report their final results to the Secretary of State by December 7. The Secretary of State has until December 14 to certify the results of the election.

The OCA hired Lake Research Partners to conduct pre-election polling for Prop 37. The final results of the polling are not yet available.

"Win or lose, Prop 37 is just the beginning," said Cummins. "We've put GMO labeling on the national map, and we've put Big Ag and Big Food on notice: This movement is stronger than ever, and it's not going away."

Activists in Washington State have already collected more than half of the signatures they need to put a similar GMO labeling initiative on the ballot there in 2013. Plans are also in the works to reignite legislative attempts in Vermont and Connecticut, where laws don't provide for citizens ballot initiatives.

The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) is an online and grassroots non-profit 501(c)3 public interest organization campaigning for health, justice, and sustainability.

The Organic Consumers Fund is a 501(c)4 allied organization of the Organic Consumers Association, focused on grassroots lobbying and legislative action.

1.6 Million Votes Remain Uncounted in California

NoMoreFakeNews
Jon Rappoport

DID PROP 37 REALLY LOSE OR WAS IT VOTE FRAUD?

Hold your horses.

On election night, not long after the polls closed in California, the announcement came out: Prop 37 was losing.

A little while later, it was all over. 37 had gone down to defeat.

But is that the whole story? No.

As of 2:30PM today, Thursday, November 8th, two days after the election, many votes in California remain uncounted.

I tried to find out how many.

It turns out that the Secretary of State of CA, responsible for elections in the state, doesn’t know.

I was told all counties in California have been asked, not ordered, to report in with those figures. It’s voluntary.

So I picked out a few of the biggest counties and called their voter registrar offices. Here are the boggling results:

Santa Clara County: 180,000 votes remain uncounted.

Orange County: 241,336 votes remain uncounted.

San Diego County: 475,000 votes remain uncounted.

LA County: 782,658 votes remain uncounted.

In just those four counties, 1.6 million votes remain uncounted.

The California Secretary of State’s website indicates that Prop 37 is behind by 559,776 votes.

So in the four counties I looked into, there are roughly three times as many uncounted votes as the margin of Prop 37′s defeat.

And as I say, I checked the numbers in only four counties. There are 54 other counties in the state. Who knows how many votes they still need to process?

So why is anyone saying Prop 37 lost?

People will say, “Well, it’s all about projections. There are experts. They know what they’re doing. They made a prediction…”

Really? Who are those experts? I have yet to find them.

For big elections, the television networks rely on a private consortium called the National Election Pool (NEP). NEP does projections and predictions. Did NEP make the premature call on Prop 37? So far I see no evidence one way or the other.

NEP makes some calls for the television networks, but NEP is composed of CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC, and AP. It could hardly be called an independent source of information for those networks.

NEP has AP (Associated Press) do the actual vote tabulating, and NEP also contracts work out to Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International to do exit polls and projections based on those polls.

Edison Media Research did the exit polls in the state of Washington for this election. How? They surveyed 1493 people by phone. Based on that, I assume they made all the projections for elections in that state, even though there is no in-person voting in Washington, and voters can submit their ballots by mail, postmarked no later than election Tuesday. So how could Edison know anything worth knowing or projecting on election night?

Both Edison Research and Mitofsky were involved in the 2004 election scandal (Kerry-Bush), in which their exit polls confounded network news anchors, because the poll results were so far off from the incoming vote-counts.

Edison and Mitofsky issued a later report explaining how the disparity could have occurred; they tried to validate their own exit-poll data and the vote-count, which was like explaining a sudden shift in ocean tides by saying clouds covered the moon. It made no sense.

So if NEP did the premature Prop 37 projections that handed 37 a resounding loss, there is little reason to accept their word.

We’re faced with a scandal here. An early unwarranted projection against Prop 37 was made, when so many votes were still uncounted.

Those votes are still uncounted.

Why should we believe anything that comes next?

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

PROP 37 AND CORPORATE LIES IN THE POST TRUTH ERA

RBN



As a historic vote with profound implications for the future of our food system nears, the question becomes whether a campaign with limitless resources and a disdain for the truth can defeat an overwhelmingly popular idea supported by a grassroots army, and over 3000 public interest organizations: the right to know what's in the food we eat and feed our families.

Poll after poll showed 90% of Americans (and Californians) favored labeling foods that have been genetically engineered (GMOs) and nearly a million signatures were gathered by California volunteers in just 10 weeks - easily qualifying Prop 37 for the ballot. And as of the first week of October, the Yes on 37 campaign enjoyed a 2 to 1 lead in the polls.

This broad statewide (and national) support - across party lines - made perfect sense. Prop 37 posits a simple question: Do we have the right to know what's in the food we eat and feed our children, or is that a decision better left to the pesticide and junk food companies bankrolling the opposition campaign?

Prop 37 isn't a referendum on genetically modified foods. It's not a ban, or a warning, it's a label.

The debate over the efficacy of genetically engineered foods should and will continue. In the meantime, Californians have a right to know, and for good reason.

A growing body of research links GMO foods to potential health risks, increased pesticide use, biodiversity loss, the emergence of super bugs and "super weeds" and the unintentional contamination of conventional crops.

Prop 37 simply adds a line of ink to a label -- as is currently required for 3,000 other ingredients -- so consumers know which products have been altered in a laboratory. 61 other countries have provided their citizens with this right, and choice, it's time we do the same.

Corporate Backlash Against Our Right to Know

In response to this growing outcry for food transparency a who's who of the world's most notorious corporate bad actors, with long histories of deceiving the public, polluting the environment, and endangering public health, converged on California to convince us we don't deserve this basic, human right. A right that nearly half the world's population already enjoys.

The No on 37 campaigns two largest contributors are pesticide giants Monsanto ($8.1 million) and Dupont ($5.4 million) - who for decades assured us Agent Orange, DDT, and Tobacco were safe. At the same time, Monsanto has actively advocated for labeling in Europe.

So how do companies like these go about persuading us that we don't deserve the right to know what they're doing to our food?

The Only Recourse: An Unprecedented Campaign of Deception

The campaign against the right to know has relied on three essential components: unlimited resources, a willingness to repeatedly lie, and a willingness to double and triple down on those lies-even when they are debunked by independent fact checkers.

Seriously, when was the last time giant, out-of-state pesticide and junk food companies spent $45 million to improve your health, protect the environment or save you money?

Spoiler Alert-they never have.

The No On 37 campaign knows that the less you know about your food, the more money they are likely to make. Their goal is literally that simple, even though their campaign of deception is far more elaborate.

They've set up phony AstroTurf groups, misrepresented spokespeople and embellished their credentials, and misrepresented leading science, government, professional and academic organizations-including (but not limited to) the National Academy of Sciences, Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, US Food and Drug Administration and World Health Organization. They've bankrolled demonstrably phony "economic studies," made repeated false statements in advertisements, deceived voters with mailers sent by obvious front groups, and repeated one falsehood after another---hoping somehow that no one would ever notice.

CA Prop 37 Scorecard...Devils And Angels

Rense
Editor's Note: Vote with your dollars, folks.