Governor Ron DeSantis’s chief strategist – Jeff Roe – is being sued by a group of “teachers, families, and businesses” in Nevada over a botched ballot initiative, with a company under his direction allegedly delivering campaign data riddled with bogus, obscene signatures. One bizarre complaint in the lawsuit filed in May is that some of the paperwork provided by Roe’s firm Axiom Strategies even “smelled like bong water”.
DeFrauded?
The Community Schools Initiative (CSI) hired Vanguard – a “subsidiary or alter ego of Axiom and [Jeff] Roe” – for a Clark County (NV) ballot initiative to “allow cities and municipalities to opt-out of the county-based school district to form their own community-based school districts”. Their job – for a cool $2.2 million – was to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures for the organization and its petitions. Roe’s firm was to guarantee a 70 percent “validity rate” and even allegedly boast to CSI that they were over 80 percent.
When the petition was submitted, however, the Nevada Secretary of State’s office found an average validity rate of just 53.2 percent. In Nevada’s First Congressional District, the complaint shows as low as a 41.6 percent rate. “The Clerk of Carson City verified the validity rate for the signatures Defendants submitted to it, at a meager 29.4 percent.” Ultimately, this caused the initiative – which cannot be attempted again for years – to fail.
No Refunds.
The suit brought in U.S. district court against Vanguard and Axiom says the Nevada Secretary of State’s office described Vanguard’s efforts as “one of the worst signature gathering exercises they had seen in Nevada history,” citing “thousands of fraudulent signatures.”
Among other glaring issues, the Secretary of States’ office is said to have found that:
- Many of the forged signatures were obvious repeated names, that used the correct first and last name but used obscenities as the middle name;
- [P]etitions contained thousands of signatures from out of state citizens;
- [S]ome of the signature pages turned in were burned… Several of the pages smelled like “bong water.”
Moreover, the lawsuit alleges that Vanguard and Axiom are not “registered with the State of Nevada, are not recognized as entities in the state, nor do they have the required state, county, or city licenses as required by Nevada law” – making them “fraudulent and/or unlawful, shell entities owned ultimately by [Jeff] Roe.”
A refund offer is said to have been extended to CSI, though later rescinded. The lawsuit is therefore attempting to secure a court order for a refund, plus attorney fees and “treble damages for fraud”.
Eddie Greim, counsel for Vanguard, told The National Pulse: “Bogus lawsuits funded by shadowy interests have been the bane of the conservative movement. We expect to prevail.”