You can always count on a tight election race to bring out the tricksters. Alas, we have reached that special time just before Tuesday, when the fake flyers and accusations and calls come out of the woodwork.
Perhaps the most egregious example I've heard so far is in Washington, where King County Executive Ron Sims is fighting off a challenge from an opponent who seeks to make the PREVIOUS election grounds for sacking the incumbent. Andrew of Northwest Progressive Institute has done a terrific job at DailyKos of culling various sources on the mass voter registration challenge orchestrated by King's GOP. A sample, from Seattle's Post-Intelligencer:
The GOP looked up addresses for commercial storage facilities and postal-box services in the Yellow Pages and cross-referenced them with voter-registration addresses to generate an initial challenge list, [Chiarman]Vance said. The party then dispatched researchers with digital cameras to confirm the illegal registrations, he said.
But the Watermarke mistakenly ended up on the final list, even though it's a three-story brick apartment building with no signs of commercial activity on the premises.
So did the single-family house at 902 First St. in Kirkland, its owner, Steve Meuter, said Friday; the registrations of both he and his wife, Linda, have been challenged, he said.
"We got these miserable letters," he said. "For us to correct this, we have to go to downtown Seattle, and God knows what kind of line you're going to stand in down there."
A regular voter and a resident of Kirkland for 30 years, Meuter said he's lived with his wife at 902 First St. since 2002.
The fairly amateurish attempt to play "gotcha" with King voters may well have backlashed, given the amount of media attention over the numerous mistakes made in gathering the list. Perhaps they should have actually gone out and checked the addresses they were listing, not only to save themselves some embarrassment, but to comply with the law. Because Vice Chair Lori Sotelo signed the challenge forms without actually having personal knowledge of the registrations being illegal, there's a good chance she's facing some perjury charges.
Be sure to read the work linked to in The Stranger, which has been closest to the story. Is this unusual (not the fuckups; the effort to mass-challenge voters right before an election)? You bet:
Concerted efforts to purge voters from the rolls -- especially GOP efforts -- are nothing new. A 2004 report by professor Chandler Davidson and other researchers at Rice University in Houston documents numerous "ballot security programs" mounted by Republicans across the country in the past 50 years. Most of them were targeted at black and other minority voters who traditionally vote Democratic, the authors said.
And Harvard Law School professor Heather Gerken, an authority in the field, said Friday, "There's always one side that's in favor of making it easier to vote, and then on the other side there are people who argue about integrity and fraud. It's always Democrats on the first side and Republicans on the second, and this is not a coincidence."
Over in Virginia, where former Lt. Goobernor (and Richmond mayor when I lived there) Tim Kaine is running against former Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, dueling decepto-flyers appear to be the tool of choice. Here's a look at the "Democrat Voting Guide" which was actually put out by Friends of Kilgore and pimps indy candidate Russell Potts, but he's just catching up to Kaine, who's actually already been fined for his misleading flyer, which looks like a Kilgore ad but then flays him in text. And if you've been too lazy to pick up your mail in the Old Dominion, they'll get you with a bizarre sounding robo-call (again from Kilgoreites) that actually appears to use Kaine's voice at the beginning.
But of course, there's no place like Jersey when it comes to smears, and if you really want to get things done right, you gotta allege that your opponent has been screwing people he shouldn't have. If you want to up the ante, you could even suggest that the woman was forced to have an abortion to cover the whole thing up! But be careful, if it's caught that your own campaign manager was the one spreading the bile, you may lose the "improper fucking" battle on points.
Vive la Democracie!
Update 330pm--
The Virginia State Board of Elections has rather indignantly slapped the same fine on the Kilgore campaign as on Kaine's, finding the former's previous sanctimony on the issue disingenuous at best:
Board Secretary Jean Jensen complained that the board "is being used for political gain." She noted that Charles Spies, a lawyer for the Republican Governors Association, blasted the Kaine flier as "dishonest and deceptive" during Friday's board meeting.
"My anger is based on the fact that by amazing coincidence, during the time Mr. Spies was addressing the board regarding dishonesty and deception, the mailer before us was being delivered to the mail boxes of Virginia voters," Jensen said.
Great name for a GOP lawyer, by the by.
--TJ
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