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Until a couple of weeks ago, the “Yes on Measure F, Housing for All” campaign had been a pretty cheerful affair, its website and political mailers featuring cartoony illustrations of suburbia and stock photographs of smiling families in, uh, some nice-looking town that’s definitely not Eureka.

But the last couple of political mailers and social media ads have assumed a much darker tone. “CHEATERS ALWAYS LOSE!” one recent mailer scolds in all caps. The campaign’s anger is palpable. “For some people, if they can’t win fair and square, they CHEAT!” the mailer says on one side. On the other, a rallying cry to honest citizens: “We won’t let a small group of SORE LOSERS undermine our democracy!”

Who cheated? Well, the evidence of this nefarious, democracy-hating fraud is presented in a pair of side-by-side photos, “BEFORE” and “AFTER” images that the campaign also highlights in this video:

The implication is that some unscrupulous saboteur sneaked onto the front yard of a “Yes on F” supporter, defaced their sign to reverse its meaning and then replaced it in exactly the same spot at precisely the same off-kilter angle.

Little did this lowdown scoundrel know that the vigilant patriots behind “Yes on F” were one step ahead. They’d evidently had the foresight to snap a “BEFORE” photo, so when the sign was replaced with a vandalized version, the “Yes on F” crew returned to the scene of the “crime” to capture an “AFTER” shot — again, at the identical angle. (Skeptics point out that the photographer even seems to have convinced dandelions, debris and the sun not to budge between shots.)

According to the property owner, however, that’s not at all what happened. Chris, who asked the Outpost not to use his last name due to fear of retaliation, said that’s his front yard and his modified sign depicted in the campaign mailers. He says he covered up the “YES” with a “No” after the sign was stuck into his lawn without his permission.

“I’m just a retired old guy that paints and gardens and walks my cat on a leash and does good things for my community,” Chris said when reached by phone last week. “It’s not like I’m heavily political, right?”

Chris said he started receiving unsolicited text messages from the “Yes on F” campaign last month. 

“Finally, I started responding, because sometimes I can be a smart-ass,” he said. “And I asked them for four ‘No on F’ signs. They texted me again. I asked them for four ‘No on F’ signs again.”

But the texts kept coming, and finally Chris decided to go ahead and accept a “Yes” sign.

“In their [campaign] stuff they say they’ll deliver it to your front door, which would be fine,” he said. “I do political art so I figured, let them spend money [and] give me a sign. I might do political art with it like I have in pretty much every election for the last I-don’t-know-how-long.”

Some days later, Chris returned home from running errands to discover that, rather than delivering the sign to his front door, someone had erected one in his front yard, shoving the legs of a wire H-frame into the ground near the trunk of a skinny fruit tree.

“And that was kind of weird,” Chris said. “They came to my front yard and put up a ‘Yes on F’ sign after it was pretty obvious I was a ‘No’ person.”

He pulled the sign out, brought it into his studio and “tidied it up pretty quick,” he said, referring to his painted modifications, which changed the “Yes” to a “No” and whited out a QR code and the slogan “Housing for All.”

Now, having seen the mailer describing his art project as criminal vandalism, Chris suspects he was set up.

“I think they knew I was going to do it, and I think they thought it would work to their political advantage to claim that their signs are getting vandalized,” he said.

The “Yes on F” campaign suggests that anti-Measure F crimes have been rampant. The first flier on this topic says that within 24 hours of distributing the first batch of campaign signs, “many were vandalized or even stolen.”

The flier describes such actions as “a tremendous display of weakness and cowardice by a small group of people who think the way to win an election is to illegally stop the other side from campaigning.” And it warns, “These incidents have been reported to the police.”

Have they, though? Eureka Police Department’s public information officer, Laura Montagna, said no.

“We don’t have data that supports that at all,” she said after being contacted by the Outpost on Monday. Montagna said she checked with both EPD Chief Brian Stephens and Commander Leonard LaFrance and looked through the past three months’ worth of call logs but found no reports of such vandalism.

The Outpost reached out to representatives of the “Yes on F” campaign, including Gail Rymer, the Tennessee-based spokesperson for Security National (the Rob Arkley-founded real estate servicing firm sponsoring the initiative), and campaign co-chair Mike Munson. We explained that we’d spoken with a man who took credit for modifying the sign as a work of “political art” and we asked for details about this and all other alleged incidents that have been reported to police.

Munson replied via email, saying he’s currently in Chicago and would forward the inquiry to a colleague. Rymer sent the following statement:

I’m glad you mentioned art. Voters surveyed have identified a strong desire to maintain downtown parking to keep the area a vibrant center for art, culture, and tourism. Measure F does precisely this and is a win-win for the arts, residents, and small businesses. 

Thanks very much for your ongoing interest. Nice work on identifying an individual who confessed to “cheating and lawbreaking” by defacing political campaign materials and trampling on the democratic political process. The authorities will appreciate that, as well. 

We’ve got links to our previous Measure F coverage in this post. To read the official arguments for and against the measure, as well as the Eureka city attorney’s impartial analysis, click here. Election Day is Nov. 5.