The Oberndorf campaign for mayor in Virginia Beach has filed a formal complaint in regards to the distribution of fliers showing now mayor-elect Will Sessoms and president-elect Obama.
Bruce Williams, a consultant who was hired to help the Sessoms campaign with black voters, said this week that he didn’t ask for permission to hand out the fliers.
“I’ve already gotten beaten up on this,” Williams said.
He said he didn’t know who had paid for the fliers. Somebody stopped him when he was checking on polling sites before the election and gave him the boxes containing the fliers, Williams said.
The fliers have provided fodder for bloggers and politicos in the weeks after the election.
It made Carlos Michael Segarra, a student at Norfolk State and a poll worker for Sessoms, uncomfortable. Segarra said he and a few of his fraternity brothers were recruited to work in black precincts.
Segarra said he handed out a few of those fliers on Election Day, but then, “we felt really weird and put them back in the car …. ”
Segarra said he received the fliers during a training session the night before the election at the Williams Mullen law firm in Town Center, where Sessoms supporter and former Councilman William Harrison is a partner.
Segarra said poll workers were given three fliers, including the Sessoms-Obama one, and instructed to give the flier to black voters.
And based on my analysis, those fliers cost Oberndorf the election.
From what I’ve been told, Commonwealth’s Attorney Harvey Bryant had a meeting with members of the Oberndorf campaign and several others. Bryant’s office has promised to look into the situation, and said if the evidence warranted it, he would ask for a special prosecutor to be named. Supposedly, there is some provision that would allow the perpetrator to be charged with a class 1 misdemeanor, which is said to carry jail time. (Anyone know of the section this case would fall under?)
We need to keep watching this, folks.
h/t spotter
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
LD – when the numbers are as small as they are, of course one flier could throw the election. We are not talking about tens of thousands of votes. We are talking about roughly 3,500 votes. And if you look at my analysis, it appears the fliers resulted in about 5,000 votes for Sessoms.
Now as to whether the folks should have been voting in the first place – are you advocating a return to literacy tests?
Here’s how you find out who did it – filter for Republicans who are fans of The Wire *and* have a facility with graphic design. Max five people in the city, I bet.
So, someone remind me, who was that Dem politician from Norfolk who photoshopped George Allen into his brochure? Howard somebody? Was in the House of Delegates.
Wow. I’ve not heard that story before. But I found a reference to it. It was Howard Copeland in his 1995 race against Thelma Drake. (Copeland lost.)
Vivian,
No I am not advocating a return to literacy tests.
I’m just saying that every voter should have been giving more thought to who they were going to vote for. If they are so uninformed that a single flier sways their vote perhaps they should have put a little more thought into it ahead of time. If they are indeed that ill informed they should have abstained.
I am not asking them to do more then I myself was willing to do. I abstained from the mayoral and city council elections because I did not consider myself informed enough.
An alternative, if they were unable to keep up on all the elections themselves, would have been for them to consult with someone they trust who was better informed.
I missed this earlier:
Somewhere around 5,000, I’d bet 😉
LD – last time I checked, something like 14% of voters make up their minds at the polls. That’s not to say they are not informed, only that they make up their minds then. So perhaps they couldn’t decide between the two and the flier was the tipping point.
Or maybe they weren’t well-informed. Does that mean that they should be allowed to be misled?
And a lot of people don’t vote downticket. But every candidate further down on the ballot tries very hard to convince them to do so.
Vivian,
The flier was wrong.
However I have trouble accepting your analysis that the fliers caused Meyera to lose the election as being accurate.
Perhaps I have too much faith in the electorate? But if the electorate are that bad, how do you explain Glenn Nye’s victory?
Show me a fallacy in my analysis. For that matter, run the numbers yourself. The numbers don’t lie.
And tell me – what does the Nye race have to do with this? Glen won because of a whole different set of reasons.
Perhaps if they were that “misled” by a single flier they would have been “led” by other campaign advertisements.
If they were so ill informed that a single flier could affect their vote then even one radio add could have influenced them.
I am hoping Glenn Nye won not just because he was the Democrat. I think his considerable majority reflects more then that, the voters did not decide at the last minute.
Where’s the logic in that, LD? Do you have specific knowledge of a targeted radio ad or other targeted advertising? Perhaps you are not aware of the way advertising is targeted to certain audiences.
Have you looked at the numbers yourself? Did you see, for example, Seatack, where Obama beat McCain by nearly a 2:1 margin, Georgia Allen beat Rosemary Wilson by almost 2:1 and Sessoms beat Oberndorf, 807 to 564? You think a radio ad did that?
No, it was the flier, which specifically tied Sessoms to Obama.
And I said before – this isn’t about Nye. There are other reasons (his being a Democrat is one of them) for his win.
And Seatack is the precinct that just happened to open late.
Those figures are pretty persuasive, Vivian.
On a more fundamental level, think about it. If the Sessoms campaign and the people at the Williams Mullen law firm didn’t think the fliers would make a difference, why did they issue and distribute them in the first place? Obviously, they believed the fliers would influence certain targeted voters, or they would not have bothered.
We can argue after the fact as to how much influence the illegal fliers had, but that’s really beside the point. Sessoms must have thought they would do the trick, or he wouldn’t have used the fliers.
MB said:
“Here’s how you find out who did it – filter for Republicans who are fans of The Wire *and* have a facility with graphic design. Max five people in the city, I bet.”
Hmmm.
http://www.abrucewilliams.com/OurStaff.html
Do you think this guy has a facility for graphic design, or do you think some mysterious stranger just happened to hand him a bunch of boxes of these fliers, which he inadvertently used without thinking? And accidentally instructed NSU students to hand out to black voters in black precincts? Remember, though, he’s “already gotten beaten up on this.”
Vivian,
I can point to one targeted add that came close to convincing me to vote for Meyera (it was not successful, I still abstained). I do not listen to the media outlets that would have been used to target the precincts you mention, so I can not point to an example. Most times my radio is tuned to NPR (National Public Radio). However Sessoms seemed to have ample funds to engage in targeted campaigning.
If somebody or some group faults the Seatack community with how they voted, perhaps they should increase their efforts within that community to educate them ahead of the game next time.
LD – I’m not sure that you know what the word “targeted” means in this case.
Nevertheless, I guess in some ways it is refreshing that you still think that our political system is pure and not as corrupt as it is. A naive position, but refreshing nonetheless.
Rare is the case where campaign shenanigans such as these can be tied directly to results. Most of the time, such acts happen earlier in the campaign, which don’t allow for a direct analysis of their effects.
The sad part of all of this is that Sessoms could have won this election without engaging in such tactics. Instead his win is forever tainted by them.
As for educating, well, that’s what I said in my original piece. But the harsh truth is that keeping people ignorant of the facts is a well-used campaign tactic.