“Another day, another scandal. It would be Paul Babeu who actually makes digital strategy this controversial,” said DCCC Spokesman Tyler Law.
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Election 2016: Lamb campaign: Babeu devious
Case Grande Dispatch
Politics has always created heated battles and verbal attacks, but in the 21st century, computers can be the preferred weapon of choice.
In the race for sheriff in Pinal County, Republican Mark Lamb is accusing the campaign of Republican Steve Henry of a series of underhanded moves to effectively silence Lamb’s presence on the Web — moves Lamb says are likely being orchestrated by Sheriff Paul Babeu, Henry’s campaign chairman.
Greg Thornberg, political strategist for Lamb’s campaign, accused Babeu of working behind the scenes to get people to report Lamb campaign emails as spam, flag YouTube videos as inappropriate to have them taken down and attempting to block people’s access to Lamb’s campaign website.
Thornberg said the Web attacks escalated after April 1, a day when Lamb said Babeu confronted him and told him, “We’re going to start hitting you harder,” a phrase Lamb and Thornberg considered a threat.
Lamb had to change his campaign email address because Thornberg said all of the emails the campaign sent were going into people’s spam folders instead of their normal inbox. Even the keywords “Mark Lamb for sheriff” in the body of an email would automatically send the message to spam.
Thornberg said these emails wouldn’t even go into the inboxes of campaign followers and his personal friends. In essence, those emails had been blacklisted.
The Lamb campaign changed its email from lambforsheriff2016@gmail.com to lambforpinal@gmail.com.
Thornberg said that enough people have also reported the Lamb campaign website, lambforsheriff.com, as spam so that links that are embedded in emails are warning some people it’s a spam website when they click the link.
“We’re pretty sure that it’s Babeu asking his friends to do this,” he said. “Of course our donors aren’t going to want to donate to Mark Lamb if they think it’s a spam website.”
Thornberg said a “simple, introductory” YouTube video where Lamb spoke about his candidacy was taken down from the site after several people flagged it as inappropriate. When Thornberg realized the campaign website was being reported as spam, he resorted to URL shrinkers available through tinyurl.com.
Even the shortened URLs that were designed to redirect people to the campaign website weren’t working. Thornberg said this could only happen if people started reporting the website to tinyurl.com.
Thornberg said this behavior fits in with the way the Babeu and Henry regime has been run, calling it a “denial of information and denial of access regime.”
“We’re not going to allow him to do that, nor would we do that to anyone else,” he said, adding he has backup plans that will allow Lamb’s campaign to move forward despite the roadblocks.