I’ve told bits and pieces of this story in response to comments on various threads in various places. Having done so over and over, I feel the need to go ahead and put it all out there now so that everyone has one place to turn to for my perspective as state chair. I’m going to go over this first in timeline format, then share a few additional facts about WV and the ballot access situation for us and other parties. If something in the timeline is a bit confusing, see the facts section for clarification.
December 2007: Bill Redpath approaches then-chair Kirsten Milligan about assisting WV with national party funds for ballot access. I was secretary of the party at that time. Kirsten discussed it with the executive committee, and the concensus we reached was that since we did not have a gubernatorial candidate for 2008, national party funds would be better spent elsewhere, and that we would pursue ballot access in 2012 when we had a gubernatorial candidate so that we could achieve major party status and never have to petition again.
March 2008: Kirsten Milligan resigns, and I become interim chairman.
April 2008: Russ Verney contacts me about the possibility of the Barr campaign going for ballot access in WV if Barr wins the nomination. He seems enthusiastic, and I am as well. Mr. Verney comes across very well, and I’m genuinely looking forward to working with him on this together at that point.
May 2008: I’m elected chairman for a full term. Tad Britch is elected to replace me as secretary.
May 2008: Several Barr campaign folks speak to me about the possibility of ballot access in WV while I’m in Denver as a delegate, both before and after Barr receives the nomination. Shane Corey and Russ Verney are among them. I ask them to keep in touch moving forward, and state that I’d love to bring out whatever volunteers the state party has available, but that we have very little in the way of funds, and not enough to really pay for petitioners. I state that we would like some training for our volunteers who primarily reside in the north-central area of WV. This is the last time I would be in contact with any Barr campaign staff, however. I mention to Paulie and others that I’d like to have them come petition and party with me in WV if the Barr campaign sends some funds to the state party for ballot access.
June 2008: Towards the very end of June, Jake Witmer contacts me, and says they are petitioning. I mention that I’d like to get some volunteers trained from the state party’s volunteer base. Jake states that he is in Charleston (a few hours south of the north-central area, where we have very few activists and likely no volunteers.) Jake tells me Shane Corey is coming to the Charleston area, and that he’ll be contacting me. I ask if any petitioners are active in northern WV. Jake doesn’t know. Jake sends me some documents including petitions.
July 2008: I’m still in contact with Jake every once in a while. I offer to house petitioners in my home since Morgantown/Fairmont/Clarksburg/Bridgeport is a good area for petitioning. He says he has a friend who might take me up on it if his friend is brought in by the Barr campaign. That never occurs. I also mention that several other members of the state party would likely volunteer couch space or an air-bed. Later on, Jake gives me contact info for Shane who is apparently in Charleston. I am never able to get in contact with Shane, and he never attempts to contact me.
August 2008: The Barr campaign fails to meet its deadlines. Our state party volunteer base was never utilized. Barr also fails to register as a certified write-in candidate, so that write-in votes for Barr would be counted.
September 2008: A state party member calls me, asking about the Barr lawsuit. This is the first I’d heard of it.
Now for some facts. Ballot access is a 2% theshhold of prior-election voters in WV. To achieve major party status (which means you get free ballot access without petitioning) you must have a gubernatorial candidate who receives 1% of the popular vote. After the national convention, the only person who I was ever in contact with regarding the ballot access efforts was Jake Witmer. Jake was not equipped to really do what needed to be done, as a petitioner and not someone with any real authority. In the future, ballot access efforts will be undertaken by the LPWV. I firmly believe this will better serve the interests of LP candidates throughout the state as we move forward. The Constitution Party achieved ballot access by petition in 2008 for their presidential candidate, as did Ralph Nader as an independent. The Green Party affiliate, which is called the Mountain Party, had major party status and did not need to petition.
- Matt Harris, LPWV Chair
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[...] Next Free Voice, West Virginia Libertarian Party State Chair Matt Harris writes I’ve told bits and pieces of [...]
What Matt says is true. The Barr campaign hired Cory fresh off his failed petition drive in OK. (So much for rational price allocation in a free market!) Cory’s stated attitude towards petitioners is: “I can hire ten petitioners out of any bar” (The “bar” campaign -LOL). He actually said this at the National LP Convention in Portland (at a bar) in 2006. Warning, Warning Mr. Smith!
Cory did what people who have never run a libertarian petition drive often do: He underestimated the difficulty of the problem, and eschewed hiring libertarian idealogues, like myself. He ran radio ads and newspaper ads trying to recruit locals and turn them into professional petitioners, overnight (with three weeks until the deadline). He repeatedly informs me that I am “not good as a petition drive coordinator” (because Eric Dondero, the halfwit Republican, told him so –Even though I had recently been the paid petition drive coordinator in IL for Ron Paul’s delegate ballot access drive.)
While taking Cory’s verbal abuse, I am ‘breaking open’ new locations, with the help of Austin Petersen from the National LP. But Austin calls Shane, and Shane doesn’t deliver his messages to me. Locations go unused because of this. Of course, I was breaking open new locations, because I thought that any day, Cory would need to relent, and bring in additional professional petitioners. Sadly, he keeps the drive pointed in a nose dive.
Since Shane never sent me back my orally-agreed-to written contract (gauranteeing that I would petition until the deadline), Russell Verney calls me up and demands I turn in all my signatures, so he can decide whether or not to “pull the plug on WV”. Obviously, Cory has screwed up everything so badly at this point, that Verney WOULD decide to “pull the plug”. …And this is where it gets as ugly as Russell Verney can get.
I am rightfully incensed, because this means that essentially, Cory ignored my advice, screwed up the drive, blamed me for it to save his own skin, and now, they want to cancel the whole thing, violate my contract, and stick me with the expenses. …No way.
So I do what any intelligent person would have done: I kept petitioning, and turned in on the final due date.
Of course, Cory had said I had been fired by that time, and desperately tried to bring in a bunch of mercenary petitioners in the last week to try to save the job, but it was no use. He dramatically failed. His locals didn’t do anything. His ideas about how to run a petition drive were a dramatic failure, when success would have been 100% gauranteed if he had listened to me (instead of repeatedly insulting me) from day one.
Running a petition drive is not rocket science, but it is something most over-promoted web-designers and low-level political hacks screw up.
BTW: For weeks after I left, the Barr campaign (under Verney’s direction) continued to pay mercenary non-libertarian petitioners to gather signatures. I was told I had been fired, and Russell Verney attempted to block my payment. Essentially, Verney and Cory needed to be threatened with a lawsuit in order to get them to pay me. (Bill Redpath also came to my defense, insisting that Cory honor his word. Verney directly forbade Cory to honor his word in the absence of direct legal threat, and Redpath insisted that Cory pay my lawyer –out of pocket– to write another “demand for payment” in order for me to be paid. Verney’s strategy designed to cost me money and waste my time –because I ignored his counterproductive orders in the face of ensuing calamity– did actually work though. I was forced to continue renting the rental car an extra few weeks, so I made no money off the WV job. Unlike Cory who was handsomely rewarded for sitting in air-conditioned hotel rooms and barking insane and counterproductive orders that prevented the WV LP from having any chance of making it on the ballot.)
When I turned in my last batch of signatures, the chairman of the OK LP (Angelia O’Dell) was in the room, because Cory had hired her last minute to come to WV to help on the petition drive. Mike Ferguson (Cory’s semi-sane replacement who had been called in to pick up the pieces) had scared her into thinking I was dangerous and might be coming to shoot them all (which begs the question: if these losers actually thought this, then why did they have an unarmed female sitting in the room?! What kind of lowlifes are they?). She recently informed me that she had done nothing useful, –under Cory’s direction– and had basically been hired to make copies (Cory had no petitioners for her to “coordinate”, since he never hired any of the petitioners I had waiting to come into the state, and –of course– cooordinating them would not have even been necessary).
Cory has also refused to pay Angelia O’Dell the money he owes her. As of two weeks ago, Angelia state that he owed her: $3,500 for her work as a “coordinator” in WV (verified by email on Sept 01, 2008, he wrote her: “I’ll send you the money.”). He has also failed to pay her $4,500 that he owes Oklahomans for Ballot Access Reform (OBAR) (Actually, Russell Verney promised to pay OBAR, one week after the Denver Convention). Cory also absconded with $1,500 from the LP OK that was raised for the Barr Campaign in Oklahoma, and intended to be used for that purpose. Since it was sent to the Barr campaign with the understanding it would be sent back to OK, that sum can be added to Cory’s delinquent debt.
Angelia stated that she needed the money by Feb 2nd to continue paying OBAR’s lobbyist in OK, in order to change the incredibly restrictive ballot access laws in Oklahoma. I have no idea if she was paid by that point, or not.
So what did all the LP donor money buy in WV? Waste, upon waste, upon ridiculous and extravagant waste.
While the one guy doing actual work sweated his ass off in 90 degree weather so humid he had to swim to the shadeless parking lot where he was working, coming home at night to a Motel 6, Shane Cory had a suite in a swank motel with a conference room, security locked doors, and a pool. As near as I can tell he spent most of the time in that room, interviewing potential petitioners –most of whom never gathered a single signature. In fact, I met a few of Cory’s petitioners: one of them was a 10 year old kid on a dirtbike.
I could say more: about how cory rejected using the petitioners from the Nader Campaign (even though Christina Tobin tried to talk sense into him), and the Constitution Party petitioners. I could point out how I also begged him to take them up on their offer to reciprocal petition for the WV LP. I could point out how he finally caved in and then tried to take credit for the idea. I could point out how he rejected the first petitioner I tried to bring into WV (at a very reasonable fraction of what he eventually paid for work that had no legal chance of success). I could point out a lot more ways in which he and Verney forced failure upon my resume.
But I think that any rational individual who reads this will refuse to hire Verney or Cory as test subjects in a medical experiment, much less the position of “campaign coordinators”. Caveat Emptor!
One final note: On the night that the WV deadline arrived, I was called up by Scott Kohlhaas and asked to go to CT to save their drive, with only 5 days remaining. I agreed, since I had previously been to CT and new where to go to get signatures, and how to get them. I was also friends with their Treasurer, Andy.
Right before I hang up with Scott (the guy who actually did all of the work on the 2008 National LP petition drive), I ask him if there’s any way he can reconcile with Andy Jacobs and the 3 other petitioners he defrauded in 2006, in Nebraska. This fraud is documented in the LNC meeting minutes on page 14, here: http://www.lp.org/archives/lnc20070721.pdf He said “Jake, I don’t want to talk about it.” I also told him how Cory screwed up the WV drive and was blaming me for it, and he said “Typical”. I asked him if that meant I couldn’t be hired for CT, and he said “No, we’re in a desperate situation there, and the locals have made some mistakes. I know you’ve done CT before, but I want you to leave early in the morning, and drive straight there.” I agreed.
I then checked my email, and there was a delusional email from Shane Cory blaming me for the failure in WV. It was CCed to Sean Haugh (Scott Kohlhaas’s puppet who was taking the credit and blame for Kohlhaas’s management of the National LP drive, via his title of “National Political Director”), Bill Redpath, Robert Kraus, and pretty much everyone else who worked for the LP in any capacity.
I replied, and pointed out the facts that I have pointed out here, in even greater detail, so that they could be verified.
Sean Haugh then wrote me back and informed me that “I was now forbidden from working for the LP in every state”, and that “I shouldn’t think even for an instant that I was allowed to work in CT or AL, or any other state.”
So I went down to AL where the AL LP honored their word that they had given me in 2004. (So nice to know that there are some people with integrity in the LP!) I worked for them, and even handed in a few extra signatures, just to prove I wasn’t a bad guy.
Since AL, Sean Haugh has been calling all the various states and telling them all that they are not allowed to hire me. This is true even after the point where he was “laid off” by the National LP (for abject failure, since he failed to get CT, LA, ME, and Wash DC). If you count the failure in Oklahoma as one of limited vision and overspending, then that makes 3 states and DC that failed to make it on the ballot because of Haugh and 2 states that failed to make the ballot because of Cory. Cory refused to share authority with me for WV, so he therefore is the sole reason why WV failed (although having an incompetent jerk like Verney for a boss couldn’t have helped).
I think that’s the most relevant information I have, regarding the clowns who infiltrated and ruined the the 2008 LP ballot access drive. Of course, repercussions from Sean Haugh’s “firing and blacklisting” contributions to the 2008 drive have negatively impacted several of the more gullible and useless Libertarian Parties, by preventing valuable work from being completed by longtime libertarian activists.
The End.
He actually said this at the National LP Convention in Portland (at a bar) in 2006. Warning, Warning Mr. Smith!
You mean he said this more than once?
The only time I know of was at the LNC in Pittsburgh in 2007.
Perhaps he formed the idea whilst getting blinkered in a bar, and then, unthinking, added it to his repertoire!
Oh, and thanks again for setting the story straight Matt. Your account of the events was accurate. I look for forward to coming back to WV, and helping it reach its true potential as a libertarian state. Call me any time.