A city of St. Louis election judge has come to the conclusion that campaign interference is more common than Missourians think.
“When you start digging, it looks like candidates are either blackmailing each other or that there are some types of bribes going on because their actions just don't add up,” said Andy Polacek.
Polacek, a St. Louis election judge, was reacting to the news that former Macon County associate judge Phillip Prewitt’s law license was suspended for two years by the Missouri Supreme Court for allegedly threatening a rival candidate with the doxing of her husband’s infidelities. Doxing is defined as the action or process of searching for and publishing private or identifying information about a particular individual on the internet, typically with malicious intent.
“He committed election interference because he blackmailed a potential candidate and that's not okay at all,” Polacek told the St. Louis Record. “It's unethical. It's immoral. How could you ever think that this is someone who has enough integrity, moral compass, and ethics to follow the law on the bench if they're willing to do that? You can’t.”
In addition to serving as a judge from 2011 until 2018, Prewitt had been a member of the state's Administrative Hearing Commission.
Prewitt, a Republican, is accused of threatening to disclose Democratic challenger Kristen Burks’ husband’s alleged romantic affairs as a way to influence her not to campaign against him, according to media reports.
But Polacek said bribery, blackmail, and doxing are common to both political parties.
“I'm not really surprised by any of it,” he said in an interview. “What I'm more surprised by is that the Missouri Supreme Court did something about it and I hope it's a movement towards cleaning up the corruption in the state. It's in St. Louis County. It's in St. Charles County. It's in Butler County down where Poplar Bluff is. We're hearing about incidents happening that mirror what you're seeing in Maricopa County.”
In Maricopa County, Arizona, Fox News reported that former Supreme Court chief justice Ruth McGregor is leading an investigation into findings that 20 percent of polling sites experienced tabulation machine glitches last year.
"My personal, very cynical point of view is that a lot of our government functions on this autopilot of trying to look like they're functioning properly when they really just aren't at all," Polacek added. "What happened in Macon County is actually representative of the fact that in a lot of our counties in Missouri, there is a lot of corruption going on that people just aren't aware of and it's because there has been a breakdown in paying attention to local governments in general."