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 
Vivian,
OK, I am naive.
In being naive, I am going to rejoice in Glenn Nye’s win. Seems Glenn Nye was able to win in Seatack. Get my point?
I appreciate you find my naivety amusing.
Actually, I don’t find it amusing, and I have no idea why you thought I did.
And no, I don’t get your point on Seatack since Glenn Nye’s win there had nothing to do with the contents of this thread.
I wonder how many people voted based on whether there was a disclaimer used in the flier.
After all, that’s all that’s being investigated, right?
Is the Sessom campaign still paying you, Brian? The legal issue may be the disclaimer but the ethical issue is a much bigger problem.
Trying to trivialize the effects of the flier won’t make the ethical issue go away.
Still paying me? Are you honestly writing that on the internet?
Talk about ethics.
V., you know what they say about pig wrestling. You get dirty, and the pig just likes it.
Good point, MB. Of course, I wasn’t the one running around bragging “I’m 5 for 5” after the election.
C’mon, Vivian. You made a claim in writing that Will Sessoms paid me.
I want you to prove it or say you were wrong.
After all, it’s bad to misrepresent things in writing, isn’t it?
Is the Sessom campaign still paying you, Brian? The legal issue may be the disclaimer but the ethical issue is a much bigger problem.
Trying to trivialize the effects of the flier won’t make the ethical issue go away.
Given what goes on in campaigns at all levels, this “controversy” strikes me as pretty thin gruel. This is what politics is anymore.
This dustup is so minor that even inter-blogger accusations of “who’s paying whom” are more noteworthy.
What a surprise. No comment from Vivian about her own misrepresentations.
Vivian,
If Meyera had run a better campaign in Seatack she would have won the votes.
My opinion is that she didn’t campaign in Seatack (and her name was not already not enough known) because she didn’t offer enough to Seatack.
Perhaps the uneducated voters of Seatack didn’t know who to vote for? Perhaps neither candidate offered a clear choice of who should get the vote?
Are we going to continue to allow these people to vote? Just wondering what you have to say about it. Are you in favor of literacy tests?
They voted. In accordance with their vote Sessoms won. If they do not like who won they have no one but themselves to blame.
“Are we going to continue to allow these people to vote?”
“These people?!”
There are plenty of educated and uneducated voters on both sides, Lil. I would certainly not assume that all Republicans could pass a literacy test (if it were legal, which it isn’t).
Sessoms won, but he cheated. He’s still the Mayor-elect, but he cheated. The fact that a former elected official, vice mayor, and president of a local bank, as well as the local branch of a supposedly professional law firm, with over $600,000 to burn, believed that they had to cheat and stoop to illegal fliers and misinforming and miseducating voters in order to win should tell you how little confidence they had in the merits of their position. It should also tell you a lot about their personal ethics and morals, or more accurately, lack thereof.
Are we going to continue to allow these people to continue to cheat?
Or are we going to put a stop to it?
Well you are entitled to your opinion but do you have any facts to back this up?
And truly – it says a whole lot about you to refer to anyone as “these people.”
It’s so fun when Vivian says something she can’t back up, and she can’t bring herself to apologize.