Charles Gardner, a candidate for the Cabrillo Unified School District board, had already reserved the space. Gardner's opponent, Jonathan Lundell, reserved a similar spot.
Apparently, in a coordinated effort to do the most damage to the Lundell campaign, the purchaser of the ad got permission from the Gardner campaign to take the reserved spot next to the long-planned Lundell ad. The "Citizens for Coastside Schools" ad came in camera-ready, which is a fancy newspaper term meaning we had to do nothing - it was bordered in the same color as the ad Lundell has been running for weeks.
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It says it is paid for by the "Citizens for Coastside Schools" and that an identification number is pending with state elections officials. Whether such identification is forthcoming remains to be seen. Officials in the county elections office say that no one needs register unless they raise more than $1,000. Our ad did not cost that much.
Is it against the law to wrongly suggest a political action committee exists? That is a matter for the California Fair Practices Commission. Officials there were swamped in the days before the election but I will be posing that question in the weeks to come.
For what it's worth, the purchaser of the ad has a point when he says such chicanery is nothing new. We've run ads from organizations with pending FPPC identifications before. Every community has suffered through candidates who steal one another's signs, who bring up irrelevant dirty laundry, who slander the opposition.
Sometimes it seems as if our democratic process has been hijacked by sixth-graders.
Suffice to say that our naivety took another hit this time around. We are currently rethinking our policy of allowing candidates to reserve prime advertising space early in the campaign season. We are also reconsidering the acceptance of any political ad that does not offer a valid ID number.
We are a nation divided. Despite record registration leading to Tuesday's general election, about half of Americans who are eligible to vote actually do so and the numbers are usually much lower in elections that do not decide the occupant of the White House. Many people don't trust politicians or the system that coronates the few to rule the many. Ads such as the one we ran on Oct. 20 do not help create a stronger democracy.
And I'm sorry for that.
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