Long form version of Protest #4

Google map of the neighborhood around 1901 Ptarmigan Trail

We may fling ourselves into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness.  But we are glad that the net-maker did not make the net in a fit of divine carelessness.  We may jump upon a child’s rocking-horse for a joke.  But we are glad the carpenter did not leave the legs of the rocking-horse unglued for a joke.”
                                                                                                   -G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

“The only superpower you need is the ability to read minds.”
          -Florian von Donnersmarck, profiled in the “The New Yorker” magazine, 21 January 2019


My perception of “who I am” in the world of famed English poet and theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton changes as I age.  Just like the Samuel L. Jackson character near the end of the movie “Pulp Fiction”, reassessing whether he represents the shepherd or the righteous man in the Bible passage he likes to quote, I wonder whether I am a careless vacationer or a careful craftsman as I travel through life.  How do I approach my job, a pair of wonderful yet admittedly maturing parents who request, often without asking, a bit more help at home, my own retirement – With care, or with carelessness?  How do I tackle complicated people and relationships and problems as they crop up – With wisdom, or recklessness?  How do I examine, carefully, forensically, a potentially problematic petition if I can’t even obtain basic information about how a building is laid out, to determine if there is a pattern to how signatures were obtained?  Do I just say “oh well” and move on, or do I point out the appearance of obstruction from the other side on even simple, non-controversial questions?  We have clearly reached an impasse, and it may be well to consider the dictate of the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, who advised “Where there is no love, put love - and you will find love.”

Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the mountain coaster proposal, the recall effort, and, most critically for me as a scientist and strong believer in the sanctity of the legal document (which in the scientific world equates to the reproducibility and validity of experiments conducted in the lab and submitted as “discoveries” for peer-review) known as the recall petition, I have to recognize my own biases and weaknesses and shortcomings in examining the data, and, most importantly, the inability for me or anyone else to read people’s minds, or determine people’s intentions, from a few scraps of handwriting.  The submitted document produced by the recall committee represents essentially the results of an experiment conducted by opponents of the coaster and of a code change which raised potentially unfounded fears of rampant commercial development in residential neighborhoods, an effort to see if they could collect enough valid signatures from registered voters in Estes Park who they believed shared their views.  That would be the kind, forgiving assessment.  Some of the petition signers you may potentially hear as witnesses might paint a bleaker picture, of being given a document to sign with no explanation or knowledge of what they were protesting.  In science, you have to produce evidence of how you obtained your work, so that someone else in a different place can attempt to reproduce it.  You must provide a section in a scientific paper known as “materials and methods” that allows for this to happen.  In this instance, the work product is being advanced by the recall committee not only as prima facie correct, but as unchallengeable.  Petitioners go into the 1901 Ptarmigan Trail lobby, and woe to those who challenge the product that comes out.

Did the recall petition organizers, bolstered by a belief in their cause and a rallying cry of “let’s put on a show”, carefully prepare themselves, or carelessly throw themselves into, the collecting of signatures, trusting in the strength of the town government to catch any rookie mistakes?  As I compare signatures and handwriting produced (at least in theory) by the same individuals side-by-side in a way the Estes Park Town Clerk was not required (and indeed, was not allowed) to do, does a convincing or a concerning picture emerge of safeguards put in place to protect “at-risk” residents of the Good Samaritan Society, providers of a not insignificant number of petition signers?  Did residents with memory loss or dementia (which the Good Samaritan Society freely admits exists in their population in at least a great a percentage as the surrounding Estes Park community) understand the document they were signing, and were they told and reassured they had a choice to either sign or not sign?  Did the Good Samaritan Society administration and staff truly take a “hands-off” approach to the petition?  Can I (or should we, as a community) trust that Good Samaritan Society administration, staff, and, most importantly, the petition organizers they allowed to enter the 1901 Ptarmigan Trail building on more than one occasion between February 2019 and April 2019 (see attached documents #2 and #5), were competent and unbiased in evaluating who was qualified to sign the petition (meaning who was registered to vote in Larimer County, and who had updated their voter registration if they had recently moved to the campus or even changed apartment rooms within the 1901 Ptarmigan Trail building since the last election), exercising extreme care, essentially protective care, in determining who among the potential petition signers approaching their table would be able to mount a vigorous defense of the veracity of their signature if challenged,  who it would be best to provide outside assistance for (and not from the petition circulator) if the task of filling out the form proved difficult, and who it was probably best to pass over?
 
Disenfranchisement is never an acceptable thing, and high failure rate “literacy tests” administered to determine who gets to participate in a democracy and who doesn’t, all too common in America’s overtly discriminatory past, are horrific, illegal, unethical, reprehensible things.  Yet it should be acknowledged there are limits to “erring on the side of the voter”.  There must be, or organizers of any petition could simply obtain voter registration rolls and start filling out the petitions themselves.  A competent forger or twelve unrelated individuals could produce enough varieties in handwriting to complete a petition section with space for 30 names, all of which met the legal requirements of name and physical address matching information on voter rolls.  Signers of a petition must be able to defend the basic challenge that they were indeed the individuals signing the document.  It would be better if they could provide convincing or reassuring details surrounding the actual signing event – Where it occurred, what motivated them to sign, in this particular instance whether they signed one petition or both petitions.  They are probably not legally required to provide any of this information, but they certainly should be able to confidently assert “This is my signature, this is my handwriting.”    

The petition submitted for the recall of Cody Rex Walker contained 574 signatures (after removal of all appearances above one of those who signed the petition multiple times, and omitting those names heavily crossed out).  By far the largest contributors to this number on a list ranked by street address were individuals providing a Ptarmigan Trail (or the proximal and connected Ptarmigan Lane) physical address.  These two streets wind around and through the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society of Estes Park “campus”, which, according to the Good Samaritan website, provides independent townhome or apartment living as well as assisted living for qualified residents 55 years of age and older.  Nearly 10% of the total submitted names on the Cody Rex Walker recall petition originated from registered voters occupying townhomes or apartments on this site (see attached documents #1 and #2).  This is hardly surprising, as the Yakutat Corporation’s (of which Cody Rex Walker is one of the principal shareholders) proposed mountain coaster is located on property east of Good Samaritan Society residences, with the potential attendant noise and increased traffic presented on a zoomed-out map by opponents of the mountain coaster as essentially “across the street”.  In a guest editorial published in the Estes Park Trail-Gazette in 2018 (see attached document #3), Julie Lee, the Good Samaritan Society executive director, presented these as “quality of life” issues critical to the well-being of their residents, in particular residents of their assisted-living community.  Similar concerns were voiced in the surrounding neighborhood, which is why it is not surprising adjacent physical addresses with the street names Redtail Hawk Drive (23 submitted names on the Cody Rex Walker recall petition), Wildfire Road (23 submitted names but only 20 unique individuals on the Cody Rex Walker recall petition), and Gray Hawk Court (13 submitted names on the Cody Rex Walker recall petition), for example, adjacent to but not connected with the Good Samaritan Society, also rank near the top of the list of petition signers arranged by registered physical street address.

[Footnote #1, if I were using footnotes: These numbers and these rankings were not provided by or vetted by the Estes Park Town Clerk or any other local government department, not should these entities have been expected to waste taxpayer dollars engaged in same.  Instead, they were generated from manual transcription, alphabetical arrangement by last name, and subsequent digitization as an assembled, searchable database by private citizens, including but not limited to the protestor.  If questions surrounding whether the resulting database of petition signers was “accurate” and thus able to generate meaningful data through its use have not already been raised by the other side, they should be.  We welcome critical evaluation of the strength of our generated database, and of our data.  The attached “Protest #4 signature comparisons” electronic document should reassure any detractors that, at least in the case of the 48 petition signers of both petitions with a physical Ptarmigan Trail or Ptarmigan Lane street address, this database worked just fine - it did not introduce any names that cannot be verified by locating and displaying their contributions to the recall petitions.  If the alphabetical searchable database of Cody Rex Walker recall petition signers missed any additional signers of his recall petitions with a Ptarmigan Trail or Ptarmigan Lane physical address, that would defeat our purpose of attempting to find every example of individuals who signed both petitions in order to look for discrepancies, (i.e., we would have potentially left additional discrepancies undiscovered), so detractors should be thankful if we missed any.  The complete photographic reproductions of every section and every page from the submitted Todd Jirsa and Cody Rex Walker recall petitions are also attached as files, so anyone is free to independently “check our work” through random selection and cross comparison, or extract and create their own database, if they don’t trust ours.]

[Footnote #2:  It will be noted, if anyone has the time to look through the complete list and tally results, the number of valid signatures and potentially invalid signatures from our list does not equal numbers provided by the Town Clerk.  There are any number of ways to explain this, but most significantly (1) we did not take into account those petition sections currently “sequestered” because of notary problems, believe the signers are blameless, and giving the petition circulators the benefit of the doubt that these were simply the innocent mistakes of rookie petition circulators, and not proof of purposeful intent to deceive, and (2) we weren’t attempting to arrive at identical counts, or what would be the point of a protest?  Our database calls the validity of every single problematic (for us) entry into question in extremely nitpicky detail.  We acknowledge the local government is not set up to grind to a screeching halt and examine “hanging-chad” type problems until the end of time.  The town clerk and staff don’t have enough hours in the workday, nor do they have the responsibility, to sit down and justify every single decision made on every single name on every single petition, and we had no interest in plaguing or harassing this office with these types of requests.  However, just because something CAN’T be done doesn’t mean it SHOULDN’T be done.  In a perfect world, both sides would be able to spend a few days leisurely examining entries and robustly defending reasons to continue to allow entries to count or consider throwing out (or at least “curing”) entries exhibiting the kinds of problems pointed out in section #3 of protest #3 (which are rampant), currently granted a free pass because of “erring on the side of the voter”.  But life is not always fair, politics makes strange bedfellows, dry ice sublimates before melting, etc., etc.] 


According to the latest state voter registration rolls, thirty (30) individuals with 1901 Ptarmigan Trail street addresses in Estes Park are currently registered to vote in Larimer County, and thirteen (13) individuals with 1902 Ptarmigan Trail street addresses are similarly registered.  The 1902 Ptarmigan Trail address, as near as I can determine from not being allowed a guided tour of the building, is partly or wholly comprised of assisted-living apartments.  I find it intriguing, then, especially when a guest editorial specifically mentions the impact of the proposed mountain coaster on assisted living units, and with 13 individuals being registered to send a direct message of this concern (document #3), that no signatures appear on the submitted petitions with a 1902 Ptarmigan Trail street address.  The participation rate on both petitions among those with a 1901 Ptarmigan Trail address was 22 out of 30 registered voters (73%), an impressive percentage reflecting a better participation rate than any local election in history, only lower than the near-unanimous vote of town residents to incorporate in 1917, with a zero percent participation rate from those most likely to be impacted by the coaster.  I’m not being snitty about this, I’m just saying that, based on random chance, this would be predicted to NEVER happen, the odds would be astronomical, of a 72% participation rate from one half of the building and a 0% participation rate from the other half, unless some dictate was in place for residents of 1902 Ptarmigan Trail NOT to sign the petition.  How does the Good Samaritan Society executive director or staff answer for this disenfranchisement (or for the 0% participation rate from residents of the affiliated Estes Park Health Living Center, with a Prospect Avenue address), unless a decision was made not to allow these individuals to sign the petitions?  If so, for what reason, why disenfranchise voters, other than for the speculative reason of concern these signatures might be open to challenge?

In order to request a re-examination of names that were validated because they met all the initial requirements (properly following instructions, living within the town limits, being a registered voter in Larimer County, not having any felony convictions, etc., i.e., everything within the Town Clerk’s purview), comparisons of signatures of the same individual between petitions (something not within  the Town Clerk’s purview) requires display of these entries, and analysis of the entries, occasionally in a less-than-positive fashion.  I would much prefer NOT having to subpoena certain potential signatories who are residents of Good Samaritan Hospital (see attached document #4) and would much prefer not to project these signatures on a screen, because the individuals themselves may be present, as well as children or friends of these individuals, and I am in no way attempting to call their ability to make decisions into question, or be accused of attempting to humiliate them, in an effort to win at all costs.  As Dr. Frankenstein’s creation said, “I am not a monster.”  I don’t want to do this.  I want to be able to talk to these individuals one-on-one, or have an appointed independent examiner interview them.  I would imagine a very quick conversation would make it clear whether I was completely off base, or if I had stumbled on to something.  Certain petition entries, compared side-by-side, reveal concerns of coaching or direct assistance in filling in lines by the petition circulator(s). Legally, by signing a petition, these individuals open themselves up to this to this kind of challenge.  I don’t like it, I wish it could be otherwise, but I didn’t put these individuals in this situation, the petition circulators did.  I would much prefer the hearer assigned to these protests call a recess and go out to the Good Samaritan Society in person, viewing a simple mini-mental status exam or determination of level of alertness and orientation as administered by an independent trained medical professional through a one-way mirror.  If this is not possible, I would simply request the six individuals named on a separate attached file marked “Confidential” generate a sample of handwriting, with authentication provided by a video recording, as from a smart phone, of the sample as it is being generated. 

At the time of this writing, it seems very unlikely Julie Lee, the executive director of the Estes Park Good Samaritan Society, will be appearing in person to answer very basic questions, or appoint someone from the staff to appear on her behalf.  Some of this “stonewalling” is laughable – I have no idea how rooms are laid out in the building, and can’t picture if a designation of 1901 Ptarmigan Trail #201 means the apartment is on the second floor (if there is a second floor), or is opposite unit #101 on the same floor.  Not being able to address these simple questions makes it appear I haven’t done my homework, but more importantly, it keeps me from examining if the appearance of signatures within a section indicates a pattern NOT of sitting at a table in the main room, but of going door to door.  It would seem very coincidental if these signatures appeared on a page exactly as the rooms were arranged in the building.  This may be a nonsense hypothesis, but it can’t be examined and rejected as laughable if I can’t even obtain a floor plan.

If the Good Samaritan Society executive director is confident of these individuals’ competency, and willing to allow for transportation to the Estes Park Town Hall hearing room, for the sake of preserving confidentiality and privacy, especially as regards assessment of mental competency necessary to sign a petition, I would request the room be emptied of everyone not directly involved with the protest.  Barring that, I would request the appointed protest hearer become familiar as thoroughly as possible with the separate PowerPoint document labeled “Protest #4 signature comparisons” (that document is the only one in the packet requiring advance study), and instruct the protestor prior to projecting this document on a screen which slides to omit from the display.  I am not making any charges, and in fact the petition circulators will likely defend themselves quite vigorously against even the choices of handwriting selected for comparison, since petition circulators are legally prohibited from filling in information on behalf of petition signers.  At the same time, I cannot ignore what seems straightforward and obvious.  Occam’s razor indicates the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.  [The slides at the very end of the presentation, numbered #42 through #45, while not directly relevant to the Cody Rex Walker protest, as the individuals were signatories only to the Todd Jirsa recall, portray a pattern of recklessness (in this protestor’s opinion) on the part of certain recall organizers and petition circulators, involved in both petition drives, to obtain signatures at any cost.  I would prefer, if this were a courtroom, to discuss these final four slides in the “judge’s chamber”, or at a sidebar, but since this hearing does not take place in a courtroom, I will abstain from public comment, noting in writing instead my extreme disappointment at these obvious last-second attempts to garner signatures from individuals clearly “at risk”, who may have agreed to sign as a gesture of good faith or because they weren’t even capable of recognizing who the mayor was, perhaps not understanding or having it explained to them they were opening themselves up to potential subpoena.  Ethically and morally, I cannot call the first two signatories as witnesses, because I have a code as a trained physician requiring me to “do no harm”.  I will not add fresh wounds to a community in turmoil.  Once the recall is over, decency must return and kindness prevail, even if not all residents can bring themselves to be decent and kind.  Let the record show, though, that my anger and disgust with the behavior on display in those particular petition sections is substantial.]

I am not going to display slides that aren’t relevant, but, for example, the individual on slide #14 likely has Parkinson’s.  This is not a cute parlor trick, and I don’t already know the individual whose handwriting is on display in slide #14 beforehand to make such a “prediction” self-fulfilling.  I am not saying with 100% certainty this individual has Parkinson’s, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because individuals with Parkinson’s are in no way disqualified, and should never be prevented, from engaging in whatever intellectual, political, or physical endeavors they want to engage in – it is just that I can recognize (as could any other health professional or person living with Parkinson’s in their immediate family or circle of friends), the cramped, essentially miniaturized style of penmanship as a sequelae of certain types of Parkinsonism, a feature of disease progression known as “micrographia”.   I use slide #14 merely as an example of how even a few lines of handwriting, along with the demonstration of an ability (or inability) to execute simple verbal or written instructions through this handwriting, MAY reveal an underlying health condition, including the possibility of declining fine motor skills with or without attendant mental deterioration. 

I know a total of one current resident of the 1901 Ptarmigan Trail wing.  I knew him prior to this recall, appreciated when he participated in a local history program by sharing a fantastic slide presentation, admire his service to the country during a time of war, and appreciate and which I could approach his positive daily outlook.  He signed the recall petitions, which is his democratic right, and I am very sure he knows the issues on both sides and came to a rational decision.  I met him again when I was allowed to sit at a table in the lobby at 1901 Ptarmigan Trail for two hours on Wednesday, 8 May 2019 (under heavy supervision, and with those few individuals who approached the table likely requested to do so – my scheduled appearance certainly had been made known prior to my arrival to the residents and staff), and my views on him have not changed, in fact, my appreciation for him being willing to come over and talk with me during a difficult situation increased my admiration for him.  He signed the petitions and should have signed the petitions, and should now be allowed to live his life and tell me to “go to Hell” if he so chooses.  The problem is, I have done a very poor job of circulating around the community and meeting other 1901 Ptarmigan Trail residents.  So I freely admit this deficiency, I am very hesitant to make conclusions on people without having even been introduced, and worry about how it will reflect on me and my reputation in the community (if I have a reputation in the community, which could be the subject of another hearing) if it turns out my concerns from side-by-side comparisons of petition entries are completely wrong.

Because I will not be granted access to any of the Good Samaritan Society residents’ medical records, and because subpoenaed individuals may opt not to attend  the hearing (or Good Samaritan Society staff wisely intercede on their behalf) over concerns related to the transportation challenge and ability to tolerate an unfamiliar environment, I will likely have to rely (as will the protest hearer) on the Good Samaritan Society executive director’s assessment of certain petition signers’ competency to sign a petition.  My guess is, the director will have an a priori assessment of the mental well-being underlying the four signatures most concerning to me that is different than mine.  So the hearer of this protest will have to decide if these assessments are being made without bias, and with the residents’ best interests at heart.  The staff knows these individuals better, interacts with them every day, and any limited interaction I am allowed (which seems unlikely) will be fraught with accusations of “coaching” from the other side.

I would very much hope residents of Good Samaritan Society are treated no differently from members of the surrounding community, in that their signatures on a petition are no more inviolate from examination simply because of where they originated.  If the staff of Good Samaritan Society truly was “hands off” when it came to the signature drive taking place on their premises, they should be willing to recognize and acknowledge mistakes that may have originated from “good faith intentions” of the petition circulators simply because they were not well versed in the law.     

Attached (document #6) is a screen grab of an email sent to the executive director of the Good Samaritan Society on Tuesday, 7 May 2019 of how I wanted to approach the sensitive topic of assistance provided (where clearly warranted) on filling out the petition versus “taking over”, essentially petition signing by proxy.  I still would like these interviews of the four residents of 1901 Ptarmigan Trail handled in this way, but lacking an answer from the executive director as of submission of this document, with clipped responses of corporate still looking into these requests, I have to raise the issue once again of who has these residents’ well-being truly at the forefront of their decision-making process.  Are these petition signers individuals with a right to privacy, or are they just votes necessary to advance a cause?

Not being trained in clinical psychiatry, not having access to any of these individuals’ DSM-IV diagnosis (if, indeed, any of them are being treated by a psychiatrist or gerontologist or general practitioner qualified to assign a DSM-IV diagnosis), and further, not being aware or particularly interested in learning if advanced stages of dementia are legally disqualifying from participating in a recall or voting in an election, it is fairly irrelevant what I THINK about these residents’ mental state at the time of signing the petitions.  The signature is hardly a window into the soul. 
Thus, it would be quite a leap for me or anyone else to “conclude” anything from a scrap of handwriting.   In fact, it would border on reckless.  Ten seconds of conversation related to the weather or the increasing cost of hearing aids seems a more reasonable way to assess competency.  This is why I would prefer having the protest hearer or an independent qualified professional casually interview those individuals (the phrase “signers of concern” not being used disparagingly, but rather as it relates to concerns raised by how their petitions appear in side-by-side comparisons), or the protest hearer and parties from both sides view production of handwriting samples in a room equipped with a one-way mirror, so that these individuals can voice their own opinions and prove their qualifications to sign a petition in their own comfortable environment, in a non-threatening setting.  Whether or not this CAN be done in the limited time allotted for the protest hearings is not the same as assessing whether or not this SHOULD be done.  Note that I am not throwing out a wide net and implicating dozens of Good Samaritan Society residents who signed the Cody Rex Walker recall petition as victims of some kind of grand brainwashing scheme simply to be obstinate, or drag out the protest hearing interminably.  I hope I’m fairly judiciously requesting a closer examination into potential problems with four signatures.  I have only an allegiance to the petition document itself, and its sanctity as reflective of true results of a true democratic process, not a craven attempt to procure signatures from the vulnerable in order to win. 

Again, I’m not even asking to have the four signatures of greatest concern from the 1901/1902 Ptarmigan Trail residences invalidated, because the four signatures of concern weren’t even validated in the first place.  They were rejected by the town clerk for other reasons, either because of an incomplete or non-matching address, or because the entire petition section in which they appear is currently under “quarantine” because of improper notarization).  That does not preclude them from being “cured”, however.  Every one of these four signatures is capable of being fixed and added to the total count, even the ones that appear to have been filled out by another individual, potentially the petition circulator, if the result of the protest hearing is a reduction of the number of validated signatures below 450, the number required to proceed to a special election, with the allotment of a 15-day period for the recall committee to “fix” those signatures that can be fixed to bring the number above 450.

If petition curing becomes necessary as a result of these protests, unless the four individuals can prove otherwise that they are capable of making rational decisions, I would ask the protest hearer to admonish the petition circulators that these four individuals residing in 1901 Ptarmigan Trail whose petitions show signs of improper assistance or suggest potential advancing stages of ill health NOT be subject to a repetition of this exercise, and make a bad optic appear even worse.  

Otherwise, for the three individuals who have already provided an incorrect address, if these residents actually believe they live at these improper addresses (improper in the sense that, in one case, an individual can’t occupy two different physical locations simultaneously, and in the other, can’t occupy a physical location that isn’t possible to occupy, given the current unit numbering system in place in the 1901 wing (the senior apartments wing) of Ptarmigan Trail and the current unit numbering system currently in place in the 1902 wing (the assisted living wing) of Ptarmigan Trail), is it appropriate to overrule these beliefs in order to get another signature to add to the total?  Could this be (paradoxically) interpreted as improper coaching?

I am not making accusations, and I am not drawing conclusions.  I am simply letting side-by-side comparisons of signatures from the same individual on both petitions speak for themselves.  I do not require, and no person sitting in judgment should require, machine-like precision or near perfect reproducibility of handwriting from any human being to demonstrate competency.  The breadth of expression possible with a paintbrush or a computer mouse is infinite, and I am not so impious as to think there aren’t still plenty of good people left out there in the world despite my suspicions.