On Smear Tactics
Now, I get that the tone of the Willamette Week piece on the Dozono poll question (study the Secretary of State’s city elections manual if you want to play along at trying to determine if anything wrongful transpired) is significantly different than that of the Portland Tribune piece on the matter. And perhaps that’s why some see it as little more than a Willamette Week smear tactic against a potential Sam Adams opponent. But to compare it to last year’s Bob Ball debacle is asinine. Whether or not one believes that Willamette Week wants to keep opponents of Sam Adams out of the race, the only thing that knocked Ball out of the race was Bob Ball himself. He was, remember, running around in private trying to smear Sam Adams. If one is so righteously opposed to smear tactics, it would be wise to not conveniently drop that fact into one’s personal memory hole in one’s attempt to criticize Willamette Week.
Addendum: To come back to the poll question itself. At issue is whether or not a poll commissioned by apparently-unknown parties prior to Dozono filing to run for office, whose results were then given to Dozono, constitutes an in-kind contribution that Dozono was required to report.
My first thought when reading the stories on this question was that if reporting such a thing were not required, there would be only one word to describe that fact: Loophole.
Not requiring someone to report as a contribution a piece of valuable strategic information when it’s given to them would mean that anyone thinking of running for office could benefit from friends and allies independently conducting a great deal of campaign research before that person ever filed for office, entirely in secret and anonymously, and then simply hand over that valuable information with no recorded paper or money trail.
As near as I can tell, the Secretary of State’s city elections manual (linked above) addresses this very potential loophole, when it defines (Section 1, Page 20) “candidate” as including the following:
… an individual who has solicited or received a contribution or made an expenditure to secure the nomination or election to any public office at any time, whether or not the office for which the individual will seek nomination or election is known when the solicitation is made, the contribution is received and retained or the expenditure is made and whether or not the name of the individual is printed on a ballot
That seems pretty clearly to indicate that information valuable to a campaign must be reported as a contribution, even in a situation such as the one with the Dozono poll.
(Parenthetically, the question of whether or not the poll is valuable information is not impacted by the fact that, as Dozono states, the poll was “more discouraging than encouraging” towards a Dozono run for mayor. A poll does not have to yield enthusiastic or positive results for it to be a valuable contribution to a candidate’s campaign.)
So, there does seem to be an issue here. At the very least, apparently neither Dozono nor anyone in his campaign read Section 1, Page 20 of the city elections manual from the Secretary of State’s office, despite it taking (in my case, anyway) no more than ten minutes to locate that portion.