Battelle the Truth: U.S. Elections Hijacked Again?

For the past several years, marijuana and drug policy reform measures were winning soundly at the ballot box. Voters elected to enact 17 of 18 pro-drug reform ballot measures since 1996, when propositions to legalize the use of medical marijuana carried in California and Arizona. Since then, voters in seven other states voted to allow marijuana as a medicine. In 2000, California passed a ballot measure mandating treatment rather than incarceration for low-level drug offenders. Again, other states followed suit. In fact, the only drug reform measure that failed since 1996 was in a sweeping full legalization effort in Alaska including restitution for past convictions.

It was stunning, then, to see this month's election results, with marijuana reform measures going down to defeat in Arizona and Nevada, Ohio voters turning down a relatively tame drug treatment initiative, and South Dakota voting down an initiative to legalize industrial hemp.

The defeats are chalked up to government efforts to shoot them down. But the federal government has vehemently fought against medical marijuana and drug policy reform initiatives since 1996 with the many of the same methods used this year: Dottering old drug "czars" joining forces with law enforcement officials to whip up public fears about drug lords invading their neighborhoods and their children turning into pot-smoking couch potatoes. But still the initiatives passed, leaving officials to wring their hands and declare the voters "duped."

What changed this year? Perhaps we should ask the exit pollsters. Voter News Service (VNS), the exit polling company that all the major networks relied on in 2000 to predict Gore, then Bush as the winner in Florida and consequently the country, declared their polls unreliable on election day. Newscasters therefore had no data to compare to reported election results before announcing the Republican and anti-progressive election sweep.

In Georgia and Colorado, Republicans won races for governor and senator, respectively, despite previous polling indicating that the Democrats would win handily. If the elections got fixed, there was no accurate exit polling to dispute the numbers. Warren Mitofsky, who is credited with creating exit polling in 1967, told AP, ''The whole point of the exit polls in the first place was to stop two groups of people from making it up: reporters, and the candidates and their staff from spinning the election. It's corny, but polls, if they're done properly, are a good voice for the people.''

The company that created the software for VNS was Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio. Battelle spokeswoman Katy Delaney confirmed that Battelle had a contract with VNS and referred further inquiries to Lee C. Shapiro at VNS. Shapiro said VNS had no comment beyond the statement it issued on election day. Linda Mason, CBS News vice president and a VNS board member, told AP the company will release exit poll data at some point. ''There will be a document of record, but it will probably be more a historical document of record than an immediate news kind of thing.'' Interestingly, Battelle is one of several donors with ties to military intelligence and the Office of Homeland Security who contribute to the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA), a government-funded coalition of some 5000 anti-drug community groups. In December 2001, Resident Bush's pronouncement that drug use supports terrorism coincided with the signing of a bill that could double CADCA's $50 million funding in the next five years.

CADCA was instrumental in the federal/state coalition to undermine California and Arizona's medical marijuana laws. CADCA founder Alvah Chapman and two other CADCA officials attended a November 14, 1996 meeting in Washington DC attended by former drug czar Barry McCaffrey, former DEA Chief Thomas Constantine, and some 40 federal and state officials who sought to undermine the pro-pot measures that had passed only nine days earlier.