This Election Day, Squid wonders: Will the madness finally come to an end?

This is the Weekly’s columnist Squid, reporting from Squid’s lair, where Squid realized there’s no problem with finding a functional pen to fill out Squid’s ballot—Squid has an ever-replenishing supply of perfectly good black ink. 

In the final days leading up to the election, there’s also been an ever-replenishing supply of weird stuff that candidates and their supporters (and opponents) are doing, both IRL and on social media. 

In Salinas, dozens of protesters gathered last week outside of the Monterey County Jail to express opposition to ICE’s presence there. Also present: Salinas mayoral candidate Daniel Muñoz, telling anyone who would listen that he’s going to win the election. Multiple videos posted to social media show the interactions didn’t quite go as well as he might’ve hoped. “I want you to vote,” Muñoz tells a gaggle of protesters. But then it quickly gets confrontational. One protester questions Muñoz, skeptical of his credentials. Another wonders about recent nasty remarks toward a business owner. 

A few protesters can be heard complaining that the point is to stand up to ICE, not to stump for votes. “I don’t want you as my mayor,” one says. Muñoz tries to promote his proposed ag tax targeted toward Big Ag, but it doesn’t go over well either. The protester responds: “Do you contribute to the GDP? Do you do anything?” 

Muñoz tries to redeem himself by joining the group in solidarity against ICE but even that backfires. “Why am I here?” he beseeches the group. One young man responds: “Publicity.” 

Maybe not the kind of publicity he’d been hoping for.

Also in Salinas, the mailers from a PAC called SAFE Salinas have been piling up. The group has raised over $100,000 this election to support Dennis Donohue for mayor, Margaret D’Arrigo for council and Irma Lopez for council. But most of its spending has focused on opposition to Lopez’s opponent, incumbent Andrew Sandoval. 

Sandoval asked the team behind SAFE Salinas for documents connected to their attack ads. Obviously, they declined (politely) to turn anything over. In a letter dated Oct. 27, attorney Sarah Lang wrote: “We have reviewed your request and your request has been denied.” 

Sandoval posted the letter on his TikTok account. Campaign antics seemed to move on, until he got another letter from Lang on Oct. 29 telling him to remove the image of her signature in the letter. “You do not have my consent to post my signature,” she wrote. 

What? Lawyers sign public documents all the time, many of them filed in (public) court records. Lang argues it could be a crime—but the potential that someone else might somehow steal the likeness of her signature from a letter she wrote to a public official, and then use it for some kind of fraud, is quite a leap. 

“The First Amendment protects the right to publish that kind of information,” David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, tells Squid’s colleague. 

Squid wonders if the PAC will pay for billable hours for squabbling over the signature. 

Meanwhile, also in the social media-verse, Squid saw some 30-second video ads posted on social media by Vince Malfitano for Monterey mayor.

In one, Malfitano is seated at an outdoor dining table on Alvarado Street, with Best Of Monterey County Readers’ Poll® stars in the window right behind him—suggestive to a viewer that somehow, maybe Malfitano was voted the best. (At what, Squid can only guess; it seems he’s run into trouble every step of his career, as a dentist, as a casino operator and as an assisted living facility owner.)

The stars, in fact, have nothing to do with Malfitano but are hard-earned by Rosine’s, the restaurant behind him. But nothing is stopping Malfitano from putting a little Weekly shimmer behind him—or his attorney from posting untrue things on Nextdoor about his combative relationship with the Weekly. (Yup, this was the election cycle in which a reporter was subpoenaed by a candidate for mayor, seeking confidential source information. Squid’s human colleagues did not give it up.)

Malfitano’s lawyer, Tracy Henderson, posted using the paper’s long-since-retired name: “If the Coast Weekly would actually act like an investigative journalist we would be better off.” (Maybe she missed all of that investigative reporting, above?) “They retracted statements they printed after demands and litigation threats.” 

The fact is, the Weekly retracted nothing, but did post a correction on one story pertaining to attempted crotch-touching. (In Squid’s view, it’s still gross.)

In one of his TikTok videos, Sandoval made up a PAC name and wrote: “Paid for by Committee to Calm Down.” Squid is ready to make a donation.