Silly season turns silly: Endorsement shenanigans, and a Committee GOTV response?

It's the last weekend before Tuesday's Democratic primary, which means Durham's traditional silly season is, well, sillier than ever.

Fittingly for a red-hot election, it was a red-hot day out on Corporation St. today, as lines snaked around the Board of Elections headquarters all the way up to Duke Street. At its peak, the wait to get in to vote reportedly ran 2 1/2 hours or more today, the last day of One Stop Early Voting for this election, despite the 80-degree-plus temperatures.

In the picture at left, Durham's elections director, the indefatigable Mike Ashe (in the blue shirt) surveys to crowd still waiting to vote at 1pm, the time the polls were set to close. Ashe and his colleagues ended up using what looked like yellow crime tape to cut off the line, though anyone enqueued by 1pm was all set to vote.

The line of the day, according to a source, belonged to Ashe. A Durham EMS vehicle reported to the BOE offices in the noon heat after an individual fainted. The person was okay, but when asked what happened, Ashe reportedly quipped, "It was one of my staff -- someone came up and requested a Republican ballot."

No, there weren't many GOPers in the audience, with the notable exception of Bill Fields Jr., who let us know he's working as a staffer for the Fred Smith campaign for governor (which perhaps explains the signs on the Medical Arts building.) But there were plenty of local pols from the Dem persuasion, including almost half the candidates for the BOCC and DA slots as well as incumbents from other local offices.

(This blogger earned a sunburn on this red-hot day conducting exit polls... well, really entrance polling. It's a highly unscientific and unreliable venture, but what the heck, this ain't the Herald-Sun -- our ad rates are much, much lower, for one thing. We'll analyze the results and post 'em later this weekend.)

Committee Endorsements + Felt Pen + Photocopier = Mayhem

The real news from today in campaignville? It remains, simply said, the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, which did in fact appear to manage a mailer to Bull City households with their slate of candidates they're supporting in the race. I saw a couple of dozen of these among folks waiting in line to vote:

The authentic Committee endorsement flyers are generally on yellow cardstock, with the recipient's address and a reminder to vote on the reverse.

Sounds like I'm describing one of those fancy new dollar bills with the anti-counterfeiting technology, no? Why all the detail?

Well, you don't want to be fooled by one of these:

No, your eyes don't deceive you: someone got the bright idea of taking the Committee endorsement and adding in the names of a couple of "missing" members. Here's a closer look:

Right, because it totally looks authentic, with Howerton and Peterson's names added in, right? I mean, that's clearly not fake at all, is it?

One tip: if you're going to mark up the Committee endorsement ballot, ya might as well correct the spelling of Mr. Alston's first name, which neither original nor imitator seems to be able to get right.

I missed this particular bit of hilarity, but a BCR source informs me that when Committee chief Lavonia Allison got wind of this little mischief, she marched down to the BOE offices and stationed herself in line, checking black voters' Committee endorsement flyers and swapping them out for the "official" dockets if they had one of these little marked-up versions. Reportedly, Allison was a little close to the front of the line and had to be moved back beyond the separation zone.

BCR asked Victoria Peterson (who was hanging out in the line over at the BOE today); she professed to have no knowledge of who might have created and distributed these little fake ballots.

Seemingly more on the up-and-up would seem to be this alternative ballot, which does in fact identify itself as belonging to a different local PAC, though the ballot holds a really, really startling resemblance to the Committee docket, too:

Yes, the Concerned Citizens of Durham has its own ballot recommendations -- a slate that also happens to look so very, very much like the DCABP's. (Complete with Jonathan Alston getting an extra H, at that!)

And who's behind this one? Clue number one: the phone number given to call for rides happens to match the phone number Victoria Peterson listed on her Independent Weekly candidate profile last fall. Clue number two: Concerned Citizens for Durham is a bona fide registered PAC in Durham, chaired by Steven Matherly, a longtime Peterson ally.

So we may not have any definitive knowledge about where the fake Committee ballot comes from, but it seems fair to assume that Peterson and her supporters are linked with the Concerned Citizens ballot.

Get-Out-The-Vote Robocalls to Counteract Committee Effect?

As we talked about in our column in The Durham News this morning, the effect of the Committee's endorsement has been reverberating throughout the local political community over the past couple of weeks, particularly in light of the Committee's apparently broad-based mailing to folks in the black community.

(Example: I was speaking with an African-American woman planning to vote the Committee ticket today. I asked what part of Durham she lived in and she answered "Morrisville" -- the little sliver of that Wake County/RTP town that sticks into far-southern Durham County. Which is by way of saying, a hell of a lot of these Committee postcards appear to have gotten mailed.)

Well, BCR political insiders continue to report that some of the Committee-backed candidates' opponents are working on their own get-out-the-vote effort to try to counteract any impact from the DCABP flyers. Reportedly, a series of robocalls encouraging registered voters to turn out and vote on Tuesday in the County Commission rate are hitting phone lines in Durham, targeting areas that are demographically largely-white.

We hear that as many as four of the ten campaigns may have pitched in on the auto-dialing. Which ones? We don't have two sources' confirmation on this, but robo-calls ain't cheap.

More on the horse race tomorrow, including what if any trends we can read in the tea leaves from the exit polling.

Comments

[Phil]

Great coverage, Kevin. Does the Pulitzer have a category for local political blog with great research and writing by someone who's trying not to break down into giggles over the absurdity?

[Samantha]

We've received several robocalls, all in support of Hillary Clinton. One is a woman exhorting us to vote for Hillary, the other is Gov. Easley doing the same, with a list of policy reasons to do so and a southern accent thicker than day-old grits. We've had fun speculating on the reasons why one or both us might have been targeted. Perhaps it's just that we're in one of the more affluent areas in the city, or that we're white. Our household has a female (me) registered independent and a man registered democrat. Is the woman's call for me? Is Governor Easley's call for the male in the household? What race/gender/socioeconomic buttons are they trying to push? More generally, the calls hover between unintentionally amusing and just annoying. Is there hard evidence that robocalls actually work and are worth the expenditure?

[Coop]

I feel compelled to compliment you on the excellent use of the word "shenanigans" here: I can't think of a better way to describe this ridiculousness.

I dream of a world where people in Durham actually make up their own minds about who to vote for and don't need political action committees to tell them who to vote for. How hard is it in the Information Age to learn about the candidates yourself?

[Kevin Davis]

Coop: I'll be touching on this point more in the afternoon here when looking at the BOE early voting polling we did yesterday. Bottom line: I suspect many, many voters are turning out for Obama/Clinton and are relying on the PAC endorsements this year to decide what if anything to do at the bottom of the ticket. I saw lots and lots of DCABP endorsement lists, and even more PA green-sheets and Indy Weekly clip-and-votes. If anything, the latter two seem likely to dominate the election results this time around since some voters were seeming to combine all three, ending up in a Committee plus two result.

More to follow on this later today.

[David McMullen]

The targeted robocalls that we got (full disclosure: I'm the husband of Samantha, who posted above) made me curious about another bit of political advertising that came to our house. We received a Hillary Clinton mailer addressed to my wife (who is registered independent) and to another woman who hasn't lived at our address in at least 10 years, but who apparantly is still registered here. Significantly, it wasn't addressed to me, the registered Democrat in the household. Doesn't sway my vote much - I wasn't planning to vote for Clinton anyway - but it does make me curious why the Clinton campaign chose to target only women.

[Barry]

coop - i've been in Durham for 15 years, i consider myself reasonably well-informed, and i'm on a first name basis with most of the City Council and County Commissioners (and candidates for same). But i check the PAC endorsements very carefully. It's simply not possible to be aware of every candidates position on every issue of significance, even in a town the size of Durham. Not that i vote based on any particular PAC in any given year, but knowing who's endorsing who is very helpful.

For people who have less interest in politics than i, i can understand choosing a PAC that aligns with your values and trusting those people to investigate the candidates for you.

Nothing wrong with that in the least.

[Coop]

I have to disagree, Barry and here's why: 1) virtually all candidates in this particular town have the same values -- with rare and visible exceptions -- and 2) the process of choosing PAC endorsements in this town has been horribly corrupted. The effect of these two factors is to reduce the process of endorsing people to little more than either populariy contests or an exercise in personal power and dominant will.

For example, in a town where virtually every candidate in a primary is progressive, the People's Alliance PAC is reduced to little more a popularity contest on steroids, one step above electing the king and the queen of the prom in high school. Who gets chosen depends on how many people show up at any one endorsement meeting, how hard the unelected and long-term leaders of this PAC push their favorites and who manages to get their nominations out on the floor first. The "recommendations" are made by the same people every year, with a secretive process of evaluating the candidates and no openness as to who serves on the recommendation committee. In addition, for a so-called progressive organization, their record of choosing women leaders and including them on their recommendation committee stinks worse a pack of pigs rolling in their own crap.

Why the heck would I want to take that PAC's recommendations at face value? They may say they share my values,but they sure as heck don't practice them. (This comment does not apply to the People's Alliance itself, by the way. I have great respect for it.)

Meanwhile, the Durham Committee's method of endorsing candidates is a joke, involving a host of factors best described as psychotic and riddled with the unfathomable baggage of one person's past.

Why in the world would anyone want to take the recommendations of organizations that follow such undemocratic processes?

And, frankly, it's silly to endorse one candidate over the other when, say, eight out of ten candidates are all progressives with the exact same platform and often completely comparable levels of experience. It reduces the whole thing to an exercise in personal power -- who can ram their favorite candidates through this time? Yup, that really brings out the best in everyone.

A much better method is that used by NC Equality -- if multiple candidates meet the same criteria and pass their legislative test, then they say so and encourage their members to choose for themselves.

The only endorsement I respect somewhat is the Indy Weekly because it is based on an exhaustive and careful questionnaire, followed by a professional and thorough evaluation conducted by a lot of very informed people.

I can't speak to the Friends of Durham, by the way, as I do not know their practices.

I know the politics -- and politicians -- of this town all too well yet I still make the effort to evaluate and choose the candidates on my own without being told who to vote for by someone else. I consider it my responsibility as a citizen. There are many websites with info on the candidates now available. It's at least a good a use of my time as posting on a blog!

[Barry]

"I know the politics -- and politicians -- of this town all too well yet I still make the effort to evaluate and choose the candidates on my own without being told who to vote for by someone else. I consider it my responsibility as a citizen."

That makes you the exception rather than the rule.

For example, i'm pretty sure i know who i like in the Superintendent of Public Instruction race, but i'm not so sure about Insurance Commissioner or State Auditor. Do i really have enough time in my life to learn all the differences between Beth Wood and Fred Aiken?

"And, frankly, it's silly to endorse one candidate over the other when, say, eight out of ten candidates are all progressives with the exact same platform and often completely comparable levels of experience."

Assuming you're talking about the County Commissioners race, i'd have to disagree with you, at least this year. There are wildly different levels of experience among the candidates, and i suspect strong differences in platform as well. And as i say, i'm on a first name basis with many of the candidates. And i'm still not 100% certain who i think the best candidates are. The majority of our citizens, who may be working 50 hours a week or more to make ends meet, simply don't have the time to familiarize themselves with every candidate. Not that i think following a PACs endorsement is the best thing, but i can certainly understand why people would do that.

I'll have who i'm voting for posted at my place shortly. Comments are welcome.

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