Republican congressional candidate Bob Gray claimed in a recent radio interview that the appearance of support for Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff is inflated because Ossoff’s campaign had been putting signs on people’s lawns without their consent.
Ossoff’s campaign denies the charge. The two candidates are running to fill Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price’s vacant seat in Georgia’s 6th congressional district.
“It’s striking to me as I’m out across the district the fundamentally new and different tactics they’re using,” Gray said on “The Bryan Crabtree Show” last week. “I’ll just give you an example, if you’re running and you walk doors, you kindly knock on a door and if you have a good conversation you ask if you can put a yard sign in the yard and sometimes that works. Well, they’ve got the Hillary (Clinton) voting list and they’re just having large teams, many from out of state, walk through and they’re just putting signs in every yard of a Hillary voter. And you wake up in the morning and you don’t like the sign, maybe you throw it away. But the vast majority of the people are just leaving the sign up, which is creating a sense of energy that’s unrealistic.”
Gray said he didn’t know if the practice “is or isn’t” illegal, “but I know it to be true cause friends of mine in these neighborhoods told me it’s so.”
In an email to CNN’s KFile, Keenan Pontoni, Ossoff’s campaign manager, said there’s “no truth” to the claim.
“Our campaign has provided ways to request yard signs (sign-in sheets at events and online). We have delivered yard signs to those who have requested them, and when doing so we have included a stapled sheet explaining how they got the yard sign and who to contact if they received it in error.”