Fliergate update

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