Yet another misstatement being spread by the ‘Stop the Lens’ crowd is that 40,000 voters signed a petition to cancel the contract for architectural services with Michael Maltzan.
For example, Nicholas Weathersbee, a prominent leader of ‘Stop the Lens’, posted on Patch that, “By the time Stop The Lens finishes their collecting, over 40,000 people would have signed both petitions.”
Weathersbee is either guilty of bad math or he’s lying.
According to a review of the Pinellas County Supervisor of Election’s data for the ‘Stop the Lens’ and the ‘Vote on the Pier’ petition drives, only 3,027 registered St. Petersburg voters signed both petition.
To give credit to these drives, 29,294 currently registered voters signed at least one of the petitions, which is why the issue will be on the ballot. There’s no disputing that math.
But the lie being told by Weathersbee and Co. is that 40,000 people signed both petitions. What Weathersbee perhaps meant to say is that over 40,000 people signed either of the two petitions — but even with that statement, he’s exaggerating by over 10,000 voters.
Let’s give Weathersbee and the others in the ‘Stop the Lens’ crowd, including Councilman Wengay Newton, the benefit of the doubt and believe that they are simply misstating an exaggeration, rather than lying.
But, as the campaign on this issue moves forward, hopefully, Weathersbee, Newton and others will be more careful with their arithmetic.
***Update*** – Nicolas Weathersbee responds, rather politely, I may add:
“I believe that I could have written that in a better fashion. What I meant was that once Stop the Lens finishes collecting their petitions, over 40,000 petitions have been signed when combining the two petitions on the pier issue as a whole. 24,000 for Vote on The Pier, and over 20,000 with Stop The Lens. I am not in the habit of lying, but I could have done a better job of getting that idea across. I’m not talking about how many were verified, but how many were signed. Thank you for the opportunity to clear this up. I wouldn’t call it a lie, but a badly worded sentence.”
