Thread by @DanielConnolly

Imagine you’re 20 years old and you’ve been offered a job that will pay you $20 per hour - more money than you’ve ever earned before in your life. All you have to do is hand out campaign literature to voters on Election Day. Would you do it? I think most of us would.

So Election Day starts and you go to a polling site and start handing out the papers as instructed. It's simple stuff – ballots urging people to vote for this list of candidates or that list of candidates. Everything seems fine.

Then a stranger tells you that someone filed suit to stop the distribution of one of the candidate lists that you’re handing out. And then _another_ stranger shows you an image on a cell phone. You learn that a judge has ordered a halt. What would you do?

This is what 20-year-old Chris Schulze told us he experienced on Election Day early this month.
He said it all started a few days earlier, when a fraternity brother who had recently graduated from college asked if anyone was interested in a $20-per-hour campaign job.

Schulze and his roommate attended an orientation in Clark Tower in East Memphis. The job was easy. They would tell voters they were with a non-partisan organization. They would hand out official ballots endorsed by the local Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

They would follow these talking points. Among other things, they were told to say they represented the Coalition for a Better Memphis and that they were unpaid volunteers. Neither statement was true. documentcloud.org/documents/6476…

Schulze said he and his roommate figured out from a sign and from the address of the business that they was at the office of a company called Caissa Public Strategy. But he says the staffers never actually said the word “Caissa.”

Flash forward to Election Day in Memphis. Schulze goes back to the Caissa office and gets ballots. He let me take pictures of the items he picked up that day: a Republican ballot, a Dem ballot, a "Citizens for Cordova" ballot.
documentcloud.org/documents/6483…

Context: Memphis municipal elections are non-partisan. If you’re a Republican, and you support Republicans, but you don’t know anything about the candidates for low-level offices, you can use the Republican ballot to determine who to vote for.

The Republican ballot was real. But the Greater Memphis Democratic Club ballot was, in essence, fake. The Democrats didn't endorse candidates.
Many candidates would later tell @memphisnews that they paid to appear on the Greater Memphis Democratic Club ballot.

In fact, the Democrats had gone to court to stop the Greater Memphis Democratic Club ballot. Among other things, the Democrats pointed out that several people on the Greater Memphis Democratic ballot were also endorsed by the Republican party. The issue was pending in court.

You can read the court filings here. documentcloud.org/documents/6482…

Someone tells Schulze about the court action. He asks the fraternity brother, now a Caissa employee, what he should do.
The fraternity brother, Max Miller, says, in essence, don’t worry about it.
documentcloud.org/documents/6471…

Then at 11:44 a.m. on Election Day, a judge actually orders a temporary restraining order on distribution of the ballot. Schulze said another stranger told him the news. documentcloud.org/documents/6471…

They go back and forth. Chris Schulze makes clear he doesn’t believe what the Caissa staffer is telling him.
For the record, Schulze says he believes the “crimes” comment was a joke. Still, he quit. documentcloud.org/documents/6471…

It was not the end of the day for Caissa. At 4:40 p.m., Max Miller, the Caissa staffer, urges another college student to keep working.
Remember, the judge had issued a restraining order against distribution of the bogus Democratic ballot at 11:44 a.m., nearly 5 hours earlier.

Here's a look at that exchange: documentcloud.org/documents/6477…

Why would Caissa Public Strategy support such an operation? Background: Caissa was running campaigns for several candidates. Four of those City Council candidates – J. Ford Canale, Worth Morgan, Chase Carlisle and Cody Fletcher – appeared on the genuine Republican ballot.

Those 4 also appeared on the bogus Democratic ballot. The students we interviewed handed out both the genuine Republican ballot and the fake Democratic ballot. So whether the voter got a Repub. ballot or the “Democratic” ballot, they’d see endorsements for Caissa candidates.

In an interview, Brian Stephens, Caissa's CEO, said the company had no obligation to stop distributing the bogus Democratic ballot because the company and its leaders were never formally served. Caissa had never been named in the lawsuit over the deceptive Democratic ballot.

The story of Chris Schulze is just a small part of what we learned during our three-person investigation into the practice of deceptive ballots. My colleagues @samhardiman and @seramak each made major discoveries of their own.

Those discoveries include an $18,500 payment from Mayor Strickland's reelection campaign to a maker of deceptive ballots. I encourage you to explore the whole story here: this is a premium, subscription-only article - with videos.
commercialappeal.com/story/news/pol…

You can read much more reaction from candidates here: commercialappeal.com/story/news/pol…

Thank you to @SeraMak and @samhardiman as well as @markrussell44 and Jess Rollins for all their work on this. Thank you to also to Chris Schulze and the three other students we interviewed for sharing their stories.

@SeraMak @samhardiman @markrussell44 This was not just an interesting political story, it also addresses a basic moral question that many people have to face at some point. If your job requires you to do something that feels wrong to you, what would you do?