Marcum vs. Tillman: Pot, meet kettle. (Kettle is black.)
One of our loyal readers — who happens to work in Southern Pines town government — offered up an interesting comment on state Senate candidate John Marcum’s elections board complaint against Jerry Tillman:
“If THIS isn’t the pot calling the kettle black, I don’t know what is. Political signs are not allowed to be put up in Southern Pines until tomorrow [April 24]. Yet, John Marcum has had signs up all over the town’s right of way for at least two weeks. Mr. Marcum needs to take a good hard look at himself before he makes accusations against someone else. Before he claims the title of election law expert, he needs to make sure HE is following all of the rules himself. You know what they say about throwing stones in glass houses.”
Hi Brant,
Thanks for your quick action in publishing our BOE complaint this weekend. It raises serious concerns about Tillman’s long history of abuse of campaign laws. I don’t know who your “loyal reader” is since he was unwilling to identify himself. Most newspapers do not publish or comment on such unattributed comments and leave them in the blog/comment space where authentication is not required. Your reader may be unaware that for state campaigns such as mine, State G. S. 136-32 specifies signs may be placed along state controlled highways 30 days before the start of one stop voting–in the latter part of March. Due to a late start we didn’t even receive our signs until April 10. We started putting out a few signs along the state arteries beginning around around April 15. Then late last week we went back and placed some signs on the town streets, including some in Southern Pines, and there were other candidate’s signs already there. County and municipal regs are 30 days or more as far as I know. Apparently Southern Pines has adopted an ordnance which is more restrictive than the other towns in Moore County. So I’m afraid we jumped the gun there by a few days and will correct it. If any other readers notice problems, please call or email me directly at jmarcum@nc.rr.com. Thanks