At least a few chickens may have come home to roost in the Dark Side Coop. Criminal investigation has started into the forgery and trickery of the recent petition drive to put an anti-same-sex-marriage amendment on the 2008 ballot.
Late yesterday, the Associated Press reported that the Attorney General's office teed off on voter-signature forgeries. Secretary of State William Galvin spot checked signatures. KnowThyNeighbor and MassEquality collected many instances of 1) people tricked into signing the anti-SSM petitions without being allowed to see the descriptive section and 2) outright forgery of signatures on the petitions.
Apparently the AG's enforcer for this investigation will be Assistant Attorney General Stephanie Lovell. A letter from her to Galvin included, "Because some of these concerns raised allege the crime of forgery, these allegations were referred to our Criminal Bureau."The petition team drivers, Mass Family Institute had no comment yesterday and has not posted on the investigation on its sites. Its pattern has been to pretend it knows nothing of any fraud, that if there are liars in the mess, they are on the other side planting false allegations, and that the professional sig gatherers are responsible for their own actions. I'm rubber. Your glue...
As we have noted many times before, avoiding personal responsibility is an identifying characteristic of the anti-gay/anti-SSM forces.
While number of sigs involved still does not prevent the amendment from moving into the General Court for its first go at legislative approval, the wafting stench of the current ballot initiative process must be choking many of Beacon Street. We hope that this will step up the actions to overhaul the process and return them to their original constitutional intend.
Meanwhile, if the investigators bring charges for forgers, they will almost certainly have to target the minions. Short of underlings testifying that they were ordered to commit fraud, the leaders come off like they rolled in manure, but that's not a crime.
1 comment:
I really hope this issue gets its justice. Nothing should be taken more seriously in a democratic government than abuse of the democratic process. People should see jail time over this and - in my opinion - the whole ballot initiative should be thrown in the trash. If there was massive, systemic cheating involved then the results can't be trusted.
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