Ad will continue to air after state Senate candidate’s campaign files cease and desist letter
A political ad targeting Washington state House Rep. Jesse Young will continue to air after the Senate candidate’s staff filed a cease and desist letter last week to have the broadcast ad taken down.
Young’s campaign staff filed the cease and desist letter with Effectv, a subsidiary of Comcast, on Nov. 2, calling the advertisement “misleading” because it referred to Young as “dangerous” for democracy due to his participation in the Arizona “audit” following the 2020 election, as well as co-sponsoring legislation to end mail-in voting in Washington.
“The false statements have serious potential to mislead voters and the ad should be pulled from broadcast. Continued broadcast on your system is damaging to the integrity of the electoral process and inconsistent with Comcast’s prior efforts to protect voters’ franchise,” the letter from Young’s staff wrote. “Observing election audit activities, authorized by the Arizona legislature, which is what Mr. Young did, is not endorsement of or support for election conspiracy theories nor does it provide a basis for associating him with rioters.”
The letter also claimed that calls for the restoration of in-person voting, something Young has co-sponsored in the Washington legislature, neither promotes election conspiracies, nor is a “threat to democracy.”
In a letter to the station manager Friday, the New Direction PAC, which sponsored the advertisement, called the campaign’s objection “baseless” and said they believed it should be disregarded altogether. The PAC also argued that their claims in the ad were true.
The PAC argued, “Young attended the ‘audit’ even though experts and critics, Republicans and Democrats alike, warned that it was ‘a political embarrassment and another blow to the once-inviolable democratic norm that losers and winners alike honor the results of elections’ and ‘driven in part by conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines.’”
Effectv agreed with the PAC and on Friday Nov. 4 wrote in an internal email that the “legal team has determined that the claims still fall within the bounds of reasonable political debate and, as such, we should continue airing the ad.”
The ad will air through Election Day, Nov. 8. Voters have until 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 8 to turn in their ballots.
This story was originally published November 7, 2022 at 11:07 AM with the headline "Ad will continue to air after state Senate candidate’s campaign files cease and desist letter."
