People are saying this isn’t funny. We’ll let you be the judge . . .
Washington state’s attorney general Bob Ferguson is running for governor as a Democrat. And the field got a lot more crowded for him this weekend . . . after two MORE Bob Fergusons entered the race. (???)
Two other men named Bob Ferguson filed to run hours before the deadline last Friday, and it was no coincidence. A Republican operative named Glen Morgan admitted he was behind it and said he was running both campaigns.
The idea was to confuse people and split the vote between the three Bobs, so none of them would win. Or, at least not the legit Bob Ferguson. He held a press conference yesterday and called it an attack on the electoral system.
So could something so underhanded actually work? It might have, but the other two Bobs ended up dropping out of the race yesterday.
It turns out there’s a law in Washington to prevent this exact thing. It’s a felony to run for office just because you have the same name as someone else, and you can get up to 10 YEARS in jail for it.
The legit Bob Ferguson suggested the two other Bobs didn’t know about the law, and called on them to pull their names before it was too late, which they did.
Washington’s secretary of state said it isn’t actually a new tactic, and that’s why there’s a law to prevent it. Instances of people with similar names running for office go back nearly a century in Washington and other states.
Still, it sounds like they might have made it on the ballot if they hadn’t dropped out, and the legal stuff would have been dealt with later.
(Tacoma Weekly / King 5 / KOMO)
