When Denisha Mitchell was asked why she filled out paperwork to serve as an Arizona elector for the independent presidential candidate Cornel West, her first response was “What?!” Her second: What’s an elector?
“I was shocked and surprised by it all. I didn’t even know what an elector was,” Mitchell told The Associated Press on Friday. “The crazy thing is it was all forged. None of it was my handwriting. It was definitely not my signature. My email was wrong, my address was wrong.”
Mitchell’s case is the latest example of dubious tactics used in an effort to qualify West, a left-wing academic, for the ballot in states across the U.S. It’s also among the more egregious. It’s an effort that West himself apparently knows nothing about. His campaign did not immediately respond for comment Friday evening.
But as the presidential election enters a critical three-month period, there are efforts around the country to subvert the integrity of the ballot, many of them coming from a collection of conservative activists and Republican-aligned operatives pushing West’s candidacy.
That’s code for “we sent an email right before publishing and didn’t instantly get a reply”.
Not in my experience working in TV journalism. And I doubt the AP is less professional than the local TV shitshows I worked for.
They say ‘Friday evening’, presumably this Friday evening, after all businesses are closed. I’m assuming West hired some third party to get all this done, and there’s no way they’re going to get to the bottom of this over the weekend.
The West campaign has been a bit of a shitshow from the start, and while he’s a brilliant academic, he’s not an experienced politician and he hasn’t exactly hired the best campaign managers (also partly because you get blacklisted by the big parties if you ever work on a third party campaign).