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From Walksheet.com: What’s Worse – The Wrong Election Date or Wrong Polling Hours on Campaign Mailer?

November 1, 2011 in City Council, Direct Mail, election, Elections, incorrect information, misleading, negative, News by Walksheet.com | Permalink

Last week, we wrote about a great mailer effectively utilizing an opponent’s outburst at City Council – that unfortunately had the wrong Election Date on it.

Today, which marks a week until hundreds of municipal elections across the country, we see a mailer that shows the wrong polling place hours on it.

From NewsWorks.org:

In the Northeast Philadelphia City Council race, incumbent Brian O’Neill’s campaign has filed complaints with the city board of elections, the city board of ethics and the District Attorney’s office about mailings that have reached voters touting the candidacy of his Democratic opponent, Bill Rubin.

…

O’Neill’s folks are steamed because the mailer doesn’t say who paid for it – a violation of the state election code – AND because the mailer has the wrong hours for voting on November 8th. As you can see above, it says that polls open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m..

In fact, polls open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. The O’Neill campaign says the mailer is going to Republicans who would likely vote for their guy, making it look like a deliberate effort to mislead voters.

It also dovetails in nicely with a recent article we did about Independent Expenditures not helping your campaign…this mailer was an IE by AFSCME.

It could also be a dirty trick by the campaign, as the Republican opponent claims. They say the mailer went to Republican households?

We vote on the side of the wrong election day, since that’s enough to keep people away altogether.

What do you think?

From Walksheet.com: “Borrowing” Political Copy – Be Careful Who You Borrow From

October 27, 2011 in arizona, jeff biggers, News, plagiarism, racism, Recall, russell pearce, salon, talking points by Walksheet.com | Permalink

It’s best to write original political copy that is your own (or your campaign’s own) words, and not something recycled from a website.

Too often though, candidates, managers, and other political operatives feel the pinch of creating new political content and look to other sources for “talking points” and “inspiration” for what they write. Under the often overwhelming demand for articles, op-eds, newsletter columns, new website copy and emails–it’s often too tempting to go to the web for inspiration, and can sometimes border (or include outright) plagiarism.

And sometimes that plagiarism can end up being tracked to an unsavory source, even if the material was relatively innocuous (as politics goes).

In the upcoming Arizona State Senate Recall race against Russell Pearce (SB 1070 fame), Pearce’s campaign has come under fire, not so much for what has been borrowed or that it has been borrowed at all, but from where it was borrowed from.

According to an article by Jeff Biggers in Salon.com:

…a new examination of Pearce’s website and public statements reveals that the self-proclaimed architect of Arizona’s “papers please” immigration law has regularly borrowed significant portions of text from the writings of hard-line white nationalists, fringe anti-immigrant activists, and others whose views far fall outside the mainstream and presented them as his own.”

Biggers goes on to show that Pearce’s website often take wholesale from other websites and emails, including “Fred Elbel, an anti-immigrant extremist who has been linked to various white supremacist organizations.”

Biggers goes on to present enough evidence to show that Pearce’s campaign had seemingly plagiarized from other, non-racist sources, which is a big deal in itself.

Talking points on major issues get traded around a lot, but the key is to make sure that any talking points are put into your or your candidate’s own words, and not the words of people on record saying a myriad of racial slurs. The examples in the article crossed the line, especially ones taken from other published articles and authors.

And especially when you copy something from an alleged racist.

What do you think?

From Walksheet.com: Former Cop, Current Stoner, Battle It Out for City Council in Idaho

October 21, 2011 in City Council, Elections, marijuana, News by Walksheet.com | Permalink

This isn't either of the candidates...but you get the point.

We actually don’t know if write-in candidate Rob Hinkle is, or ever has been a “stoner”, but we do know that he is a big time pro-pot advocate who’s first reason to vote for him is that he would make “misdemeanor marijuana use on private property a low police priority. He [also] says marijuana use in a private home shouldn’t be prohibited.”

He’s running against retired Police Chief of Twin Falls for an open seat on the City Council in that very city!

What is former Police Chief Jim Munn’s first of three bullet point reasons why you should vote for him?

Munn says he’d bring the same values needed by police officers, which include serving your entire community and being fair to everyone, regardless of their social standing.

We were really hoping that it would that there needs to be more police officers on the streets, but that’s nice too.

Click here for the entire article from MagicValley.com

From Walksheet.com: Opposing School Board Candidates All Have the Same Stock Photo Teens in Brochures

October 14, 2011 in advertisement, brochure, Direct Mail, News, stock photo, walksheet, yard sign by Walksheet.com | Permalink

Beware of the stock photo!

The Washington Post has a blog about three candidates for a race for School Board in Fairfax, Virginia where all three candidates used stock photos of smiling graduates in their campaign mailers. The problem was, they were the same three teenagers in each candidates’ mailers. Now, even at a first glance, you can sort of tell that the teens in the photo have no idea who the candidate is, have likely never been to Fairfax (let alone Virginia), and even with a smidgen of savvyness, are most definitely models. Even so, it is somewhat embarrassing to have it so clearly pointed out. But wait! One of the candidates is accusing the other of intentionally using this stock photo to mislead voters. From the Washington Post:

Strauss said there was no such scheme afoot. “I didn’t even notice it was the same,”she said, adding that she and her daughter chose the image in July, before Epstein’s yard signs proliferated around the county. She said she couldn’t help but chuckle when someone pointed out the overlap recently. “You do your very best to have cute, engaging, diverse groups of kids,” said Strauss. “We must have looked at hundreds of photos, and this particular one was an unusually nice one.”

What do you think? Do stock photos (especially of people) bring down the authenticity of a particular piece, or are people used to it? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Ballot Access in the States: Wisconsin Emails Absentee Ballots (for now), California Approves Online Registration

October 14, 2011 in absentee, absentee ballot, ballots, Campaign Law, mail ballot, News, online voter registration, vote-by-mail, voter registration, voters by Walksheet.com | Permalink

A couple of stories on ways that state governments are making it easier for people to vote:

Wisconsin:

The State Legislature passed a voter id law back in May, and in the same law they allowed for absentee ballots to be emailed to people to request them. The voters would still have to print them out and return them by mail or in person to a polling location, but an interesting slow crawl to possible email voting some day.

However, one house of the legislature just passed a bill repealing that provision because some rural clerks don’t have access to email and wouldn’t be able to take advantage of it.

[story via www.jsonline.com]

California:

In another step toward voting online in the distant future, California recently approved online voter registration.

In the past, you could only request that a form be sent to you to be filled out.

From the Silicon Valley Mercury News:

The bill, SB 397, allows the state to begin registering voters online ahead of a new statewide voter database. It directs state election officials and the Department of Motor Vehicles to match registration information submitted online with DMV records containing an electronic copy of a voter’s signature.

From Walksheet.com: Political Photos: Five Common Mistakes When Dirty Tricks Backfire: The Sham Independent Candidate

October 12, 2011 in arizona, independent, News, sham candidate, third party by Walksheet.com | Permalink

By sham independent candidate, we mean the third candidate in what was a two-way race, recruited to suck votes away from either the incumbent, or the challenger.

Within the last week, Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce has been accused of engineering the candidacy of a third person in his recall election in order to take votes away from his recall challenger, Jerry Lewis. A judge this week found that Pearce’s allies had indeed recruited Olivia Cortes to run in order to siphon votes away from the challenger. Ms. Cortes dropped out of the race when Lewis’s supporters questioned her candidacy.

From the New York Times:

Greg Western, a Pearce ally who is the chairman of the East Valley Tea Party, was a central figure in the scheme and became Ms. Cortes’s campaign adviser. Soon, signs promoting Ms. Cortes’s candidacy appeared on street corners, bearing the motto made famous by Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers: “Sí, Se Puede!”

Ms. Cortes avoided the news media for weeks, and the few interviews she did give showed her to be shaky on the issues. Her candidacy began falling apart after another candidate, Jerry Lewis, who like Mr. Pearce is a Republican, began his own campaign. Allies of Mr. Lewis’s went to court to challenge Ms. Cortes’s election bid as a sham.

This practice of recruiting sham candidates to run as a third party and siphon votes away from one candidate is more common than one would think, but this story has a twist–Ms. Cortes seems to have been genuine in her opposition to Senator Pearce, who gained national notoriety for authoring Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration bill last year.

The New York Times story points out that the judge even pointed out how this case differed than other sham candidates, especially fictional ones portrayed in movies:

The judge also said Ms. Cortes’s case did not resemble the subterfuge displayed in “The Distinguished Gentleman,” a movie in which the actor Eddie Murphy, playing a character named Jeff Johnson, runs for Congress after an incumbent with the same name dies.

Nice one, judge.

Seriously though, have you seen examples in campaigns of sham candidates being outed, or being able to ride through the election scott free? Has a case like in the “Distinguished Gentleman” ever happened in real life?

Leave your thoughts in the comments or on Facebook!

From Walksheet.com: Political Photos: Five Common Mistakes Democrats in Connecticut Forgo Lawn Signs in Local Election

October 12, 2011 in campaign signs, connecticut, lawn signs, News, Signs, yard signs by Walksheet.com | Permalink

The debate between whether yard signs are effective or not is a never ending debate in local campaigns, but one thing is almost always certain, candidates still end up getting yard signs whether they think they are effective or not.

We’re not going to enter that debate directly here, but instead focus on a group of Democrats in Hartford, Connecticut who have banded together and decided to forgo yard signs, saying its for the environment.

From the Hartford-Courant:

Some say they’re doing it for the environment, acknowledging, though, that they save money and avoid the hassle of putting them up, replacing stolen ones and taking them down when the party is over.

Carol Anest, Democratic town chairwoman in Newington, said she pitched the no-lawn-sign idea to candidates in the November election at their first strategy meeting. They were receptive, she said.

But she was rebuffed when she tried to get local Republicans to go along.

“We want to expose our candidates to the voters,” said Ben Ancona, Newington’s Republican town chairman.

It’s as if these group of Democrats are putting the theory that lawn signs aren’t effective–in many respects, their candidacies –truly on the line.

Do you think that these candidates will be fine without the yard signs, or are they foolish for giving their Republican challengers an upper hand, however small?

Leave your thoughts in the comments!

From Walksheet.com: Political Photos: Five Common Mistakes A (Political) Scientist’s Cold Blooded Analysis of Political Advertising

October 7, 2011 in advertising, campaign advertising, john sides, News, political science, political scientist by Walksheet.com | Permalink

George Washington University Political Scientist John Sides has a terrific article over at the NY Times 538 blog which gives his scientific findings on some particulars of political campaign advertising.

Among his findings are:

1. Campaign ads matter more when the candidates are unfamiliar.

2. Campaign ads matter more when a candidate can outspend the opponent.

3. Campaign ads can matter, but not for long.

The main point of his article, The Moneyball of Campaign Advertising, though is to illustrate the difference in approach to campaigns that seasoned consultants take versus how a political scientist views elections.

The difference is in gut feeling versus hard facts:

What works is not a big bat or a golden glove, it is a campaign message. The crucial moments happen when the campaign deploys an advertisement that the advisers crafted. The championship is simply the election.

The frustration that the focus of “Moneyball,” Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, felt when listening to his scouts talking about baseball players is the frustration that a political scientist feels when listening to many campaign consultants, journalists and political commentators talk about political advertising. In their telling, campaign ads win elections, and often in dramatic fashion.”

The entire post is worth a read by clicking here.

If you are a consultant, how much does gut feeling factor into things, and does the political science even matter?

From Walksheet.com: Proposed Michigan Law Would Restrict Teachers From Using Public Property For Political Communication

September 28, 2011 in Campaign Law, campaigning, Michigan, News, students, teachers, Volunteers by Walksheet.com | Permalink

The proposed Michigan Law, Michigan House Bill No. 4052, doesn’t limit it only to teachers, but to all public employees from using “publicly owned property, facilities, or services, including an electronic mail system, for political activities [or] political fundraising…”

The reason we focus on teachers in this article is because of the way the news of this bill came to us, through an op-ed opposed to the law, which stated:

If Republican state lawmakers have their way, a public school teacher could go to jail for a year for sending a political message over the school system’s e-mail.

Really? A third-grade teacher sends a “Recall Rick Snyder” e-mail to her colleagues, and we are going to toss her in the clink?

We’ve all heard stories of the high school teacher involved in a local campaign (or even running themselves) who recruits their kids for the campaign under the auspices of “extra credit” open to other candidates. Is this something that might be included under this law? Probably not, but that begs the question:

How ethical is it for teachers to use this practice of extra credit to gain campaign volunteers?

Leave your thoughts in the comments!

From Walksheet.com: Dead Politicians and the Money They Leave Behind

September 26, 2011 in campaign accounts, Campaign Finance, dead politicians, Fundraising, louisiana, News by Walksheet.com | Permalink

The Times-Picayune website, NOLA.com, has a great article on political campaign accounts that are going on well after their politician has died. Not sure what the laws on this kind of thing are state by state, but at least in Louisiana, the good times keep going on ever after your dead. To be fair, the article makes it clear that the deceased politicians had this money in their accounts before they died, but it is still interesting to note that it has taken so long after the death for some of them to be depleted. From NOLA.com:

Former state Sen. John Hainkel died in early 2006. But more than five years later, the campaign bank account he left behind lives on, doling out money to charities and supporting his old political allies.
Ted Jackson, The Times-Picayune archiveSenators John Hainkel, right, Jay Dardenne, center, and Charlie Dewitt huddle on the floor of the Louisiana Senate in 2002. The Hainkel Campaign Fund donated $1,000 to Dardenne’s re-election campaign for lieutenant governor earlier this month, despite the fact that Hainkel died in 2006.
The latest example came earlier this month, when the Hainkel Campaign Fund sent a $1,000 check to Lt. Gov.Jay Dardenne, who is running for re-election against a challenge from Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser. Hainkel, a Republican who remains the only Louisiana legislator to serve as both House speaker and Senate president, is not alone in giving money from the grave. Records filed with the state Board of Ethics show that several deceased politicians left behind money in their political accounts, leaving their heirs to decide how and when to parcel it out.

Click here for the entire story. The money has to go somewhere (and it would be pretty unfair to send money back to some donors and not others), so it’s likely a good thing a lot of it goes to charity. But five years after the death? What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments! Image courtesy of taxbrackets.org

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