Survey Press Release

for immediate release
Sept. 13, 2007
for further information contact.
Harry Welty
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LDV publishes dubious JCI survey

Let Duluth Vote has just published a clean version of Johnson Controls important but flawed and messy survey on on the LDV website. Of particular interest to Let Duluth Vote is the convoluted question number 27 which is so important to JCI that it has been touted in their report to the state for review and comment of the Red Plan.

Rather than simply ask respondents whether they wanted to vote on the Red Plan in a referendum, Question 27 is verbose and vague. JCI claims that the results show that 71 percent of the respondents want to dispense with their voting rights. It is a radical enough idea in a city with one of the nation’s highest voting turnouts that it justifies looking back at the survey. That JCI had failed to make the survey clean and easily readable warrants suspicion. Perhaps they didn’t want too many people looking at their survey carefully. Certainly the 80 to 90 percent signature rate on the LDV survey seems to bear this out.

Everything else about the survey seems to undermine the contention that Duluth voters want to skip a referendum. For instance Question 58 finds that 46% of duluth district voters are barely making ends meet. It seems unlikely that such folks would welcome a huge school building tax.

You can peruse the survey here:

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