By BRIAN MCCOOLSeveral people who spoke at the Environmental Sustainability Board Thursday night tried to convince the board that the County’s Open Forum should not hold any merit.
Their primary reason for this was that they were convinced that the anti-ban people orchestrated a massive effort to “stuff the ballots” by voting more than once. This is very clearly demonstrated as false if one is up for a few minutes of light work.
Point your browser to: https:////www.losalamosnm.us/gov/Pages/PublicCommentForum.aspx#peak_democracy
Click on the link on the right side of the page that allows you to request a download for the “CSV” file. You will have to provide an email address where the file will be sent to and it’s usually waiting for you by the time you get over to your email program. This file is very easily analyzed with a spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel.
For example, you can filter out all those people that did not attach their name in the signature field (Name not shown). You can also perform a sort on the signature field to see if anyone voted more than one time.
I only found one name that might be considered as a duplicate, so I eliminated one of those rows. In the end, I got a total of 81 named surveys with 61 of those voting “NO”.
That’s still 75 percent of the people in this town that do not want a plastic bag ban. If I analyze the second option of “Should Los Alamos County reduce the distribution of single use bags”, I get 57 people out of 81 voting “NO”. That comes out to 70 percent.
I really wish some of these people who come out of the woodwork to waste everyone’s time with their misrepresentations of facts would just stay home, but it’s quite obvious that they believe there is some sort of conspiracy underfoot to undermine their efforts to “save the planet”.
