Rawson (kinda) in the clear on her “money flip” — or is she?

by David Safier

It seems the mystery has been solved about City Council candidate Jennifer Rawson's "You pay me, I pay you" scheme. According to the Weekly, the "contributors" purchased campaign signs for her, and she reimbursed them.

Sounds legit, right? But it's not so legit when you put in for matching funds for "contributions" that weren't contributions after all. Either Rawson and her campaign were sloppy, or they were trying to pull a fast one. Neither makes them look very good.

As Tedski commented on R-Cubed,

I guess we have a new standard: you try to pull hanky panky and are so sloppy about it that you get caught, we’ll chalk it up to incompetence and not pursue it.

Wait, is her defense that she’s incompetent? Ladies and gentleman: your Republican candidate for city council!

NOTE TO THE STAR: If you decide to cover this (probably in the Notebook), please read over the Pima Dem Media Releases carefully before you try to turn this around as a purely political stunt by the Democrats. Jeff Rogers and the Pima Dems didn't accuse Rawson of fraud. The releases both said this might be a simple case of incompetence, which doesn't speak very well for Rawson, even if there was no intention of scamming some extra matching funds.