The Florida Election Commission has ruled that St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Scott Wagman was not in violation of election laws when he ran advertisements on Google this summer.
The Commission informed Wagman in July that they had received a complaint that the ads violated state election law, because they didn’t include a disclaimer that indicates who bought them. At the time, the FEC found the complaint legally sufficient to pursue further investigation.
The complaint was made against Wagman by blogger Peter Schorsch, who was working at one time during the campaign for an opponent of Wagman, City Councilman Jamie Bennett.
When news of the investigation broke, the Wall Street Journal reported on it, writing that the case could change the rules for traditional media applied to the internet.
They wrote:
The major difference lies in exemptions. Federal law says the disclosure requirements don’t apply to bumper stickers, pens and other small items in which the disclaimer’s inclusion would be impractical. The Florida law, which applies to state and local elections, has just two exceptions: campaign messages that are designed to be worn by a person and novelty items with a retail value of $10 or less.
Wagman spoke to CL late yesterday. He said, "We're pleased that the Florida Election Commission came to this conclusion because of the very vague and unclear Florida regulation. We used common sense considering that Obama and McCain and many others have also used Google ads like that had clicks like we did, that we were in the clear. The FEC investigation was thorough and thoughtful and came to the conclusions certainly that were weren't certainly not willful in violating any laws or rules."
And Wagman said he was pleased to also learn that the FEC is going to direct the state legislature to clarify these rules and bring them up modern standards in this age of the Internet.
Wagman also said he thought the issue was an important one with 1st amendment implications, saying," we thought this was a 1st amendment issue, that many people get their information through the Internet and we needed to take a stand to clarify that."
Wagman finished fourth in the ten person primary field in September. He ultimately declined to endorse fellow Democrat Kathleen Ford in the general election, and instead contributed financially to Bill Foster.
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2009.