I’m gonna fire up the popcorn popper.
Jonathan Jenkins
When independent U.S. Senate candidate Jonathan Jenkins missed the filing deadline for the November ballot last month, it surprised the political observers who had been keeping an eye on his Texas run.
Jenkins, a Euless tech entrepreneur, seemed to be running a credible — if unusual — campaign, and he had professed full confidence he would get the more than 47,000 signatures need to qualify for the ballot. Yet the deadline, June 21, came and went without Jenkins submitting the signatures, and he and his staff went dark for days.
Now Jenkins is speaking out, alleging that the signature-gathering firm he hired misled him about the progress of the petition drive — and that associates of the Republican incumbent, Sen. Ted Cruz, meddled in the effort to keep Jenkins off the ballot. All this occurred while Jenkins paid over $350,000 to the firm, California-based Arno Petition Consultants.
That’s according to an election complaint Jenkins has filed with the Texas Secretary of State, accusing the Cruz campaign of a “coordinated and deliberate attack” against the petition drive. The complaint does not cite a specific law that Jenkins believes the Cruz campaign broke, but it asks the secretary of state’s office to investigate the allegations and refer the matter to the state attorney general. Jenkins has said he plans to look into “all other legal remedies” available.
[…]
“The rigors of democracy aren’t cut out for everyone,” Cruz strategist Jeff Roe said. “Sounds like he proved to his petition firm the old axiom, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ He should have gone out and collected signatures with volunteers like everyone else does, not hired a band of out-of-state petitioners.”
[…]
Jenkins’ complaint acknowledges a close relationship between the Indie Party and his campaign, saying the company retained Arno in April to gather more than enough signatures to make the ballot in Texas. Arno was contracted to collect the signatures at a rate of $7.50 each and submit weekly invoices reflecting how many signatures it got for the previous week, according to the complaint.
Yet as the June 21 deadline got closer, Jenkins began to have communications problems with Arno and grew concerned that the firm was not following through on its commitment, Jenkins says in the complaint. Hours before the deadline, Jenkins finally received a package of nomination petitions from Arno — and he was told it contained only 35,500 signatures, far short of the required amount, according to the complaint.
Throughout the process, Jenkins also become convinced that the Cruz campaign was improperly interfering in the petition drive. Jenkins claimed Michael Arno, the president of the firm, had told him at multiple points that the Cruz campaign had contacted him to inquire about his work for the Jenkins campaign. Things got more serious closer to the deadline, according to the complaint, which says Jenkins’ campaign “began to hear reports from the field” that Cruz associates were threatening and harassing petition circulators.
See here and here for the background. I almost don’t know where to begin, so let me get the icky bit out of the way first: Jeff Roe has a point. It’s common enough to outsource the petition-circulating process – Carole Keeton Strayhorn did that in 2006 – but how can you be so disconnected from it that you have no idea how many signatures have been collected? Bear in mind, paid circulators tend to gather a lot of ineligible signatures, so you need to make sure they’re hitting a target that will include a sufficient margin of error. Among other things, that means you need to check their work and keep your own count of where you are. I was already inclined to think that Jonathan Jenkins was a dilettante by the nature of his candidacy and the bizarre composition of the so-called “Indie Party”. Nothing about this changes my mind. Just from a project management perspective, this is an embarrassing failure.
As for the actual allegations, Jenkins’ complaint doesn’t say any laws were broken, and they didn’t provide any evidence to the Trib. I have no idea what they expect the SOS to do – maybe, like everything else with Jenkins and the “Indie Party”, this is just a publicity stunt. Be that as it may, the idea that the Cruz campaign – which apparently didn’t actually deny any of the accusations – felt the need to pull dirty tricks on them is hilarious. Feeling a little insecure in your electoral position there, Teddy? Don’t want to have a straight-up mano-a-mano race against Beto O’Rourke (okay, mano-a-mano-plus-Libertarian)? I mean seriously, don’t you have anything better to do? Just to be clear, it’s fine by me if the answer to that is No. Keep being an ass to as many people as possible. It’s your brand. I look forward to the next update in this amazingly inconsequential saga.
Would Cruz sink so low? Of course he would remember that Cruz is the child of a person that Trump said was involved in the assassination of Kennedy.