City Allies Grossly Inflate Their Numbers by "Stuffing the Ballot Boxes"

On Friday, April 22, 2011, we checked our computers and the following screen presented itself to us, reflecting an on-line opinion poll set up by our community center to assess the attitude of the French Hill, Tsameret Habirah, Giv'at HaMivtar and Ramat Eshkhol communities toward the Project to introduce bike lanes in their neighborhoods. The poll gives four options, with two of primary interest. 816 votes were counted. In favor of the Bike Lane Project just as it is drew 24% of the vote. Totally against the project at all was 70% of the vote.

After two hours had transpired, we checked our computers once more and found that the number of votes had more than doubled in the interim. Nearly all the added votes were cast in favor of the project, increasing the percentage of the tally of the votes in this category from 24% to 45%. A much smaller number were added to the classification that allowed for the bike lanes with minor changes, tallying 20% of the vote instead of 5%. No votes appear to have been added to the tally against the project, decreasing the percentage in that category from 70% to 24%.

The addition of 840 votes to the poll in two hours or less is very suspicious. This only goes to show us that any information derived from the team connected with the Project is not to be considered as trustworthy.

In this case, the community center has not built a polling mechanism that is invulnerable to doctoring and ballot-box stuffing from outsiders. It is reprehensible for the same center to leave this polling page up as though it still provides a proper representation of valid individual votes.

Furthermore, the fact that the city representatives Kobi Bartov and Naomi Tsur should openly utilize this anonymous poll as a valid source for evaluating our community's support for the project (over against the carefully documented petition of nearly 1000 signers with addresses and phone numbers) is laughable and, in fact, potentially criminal.

From our own petition presented at shopping centers and door to door (from Mt. Scopus, French Hill, Tsameret Habira, Giv'at Hamivtar and Ramat Eshkol), among young and old alike, including bicylclists, and residents from varied social, religious and ethnic backgrounds, taxi drivers and bus drivers at least 75% of those asked oppose the proposed project and those that accept it as is are less than 5%.

In light of these manipulations of the assessment of public opinion, with the knowledge of the local community center and the city representatives, there is no way to establish faith in these entities unless they allow us to to speak out fairly and democratically.

We would like to challenge these same city representatives by proposing that they allow a referendum to be executed, where the residents of our communities can say what they really think about the project through casting votes in a carefully monitored setting.