Buddy Johnson's Voter Education | Tampabay.com • St. Petersburg Times

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[Text by Michael Van Sickler and interactive by Darla Cameron]

The advertising and political science experts consulted for this story:

Walter Guarino

Guarino is president and managing partner of Insight|SGW, a strategic branding and research firm located in Montville, NJ, Guarino is 30-year veteran in the advertising business in New York and New Jersey. He is also an advertising professor at Seton Hall University. | His advertising blog

Marcia Johnson-Blanco

Senior Counsel in the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C., Johnson-Blanco works to ensure equal access to the ballot for all citizens. | Her site

Patrick Scullin

Scullin is a founding partner in the Atlanta firm, Ames Scullin O'Haire, a 13-year-old agency with more than $110 million in billings. In the early 1990s, he created the infamous Swedish Bikini Team campaign for Old Milwaukee Beer. | His firm's site

Charles Stewart

Stewart is a political science professor at MIT who specializes in the fields of American politics, political institutions, and elections. | His site

Daniel Tokaji

Tokaji is an associate professor at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law whose scholarship includes political equality, racial injustice and the role of the judiciary in a democracy, with a particular focus on election law and administration. | His site

How Buddy Johnson's ad campaign cost taxpayers $643,016

In its investigation of Buddy Johnson's elections office, the FBI has seized audit papers, financial records and records pertaining to an ambitious ad campaign created by the South Tampa firm Schifino Lee. The St. Petersburg Times undertook a comprehensive review of the ad campaign and found that Johnson approved spending $643,016 -- 16 times greater than the original contract amount -- on materials that promoted his own re-election efforts as much as its intended purpose of educating voters. | Read the story
Buddy Johnson invited firms to bid for ad campaign

Despite his political and legal battles, Buddy Johnson is still a salesman of himself

For most of the last six years, up until November, when he was voted out as Hillsborough County's supervisor of elections, Johnson was in charge of an office that became notorious for botched elections and mismanaged budgets. Read the whole story in previous St. Petersburg Times coverage of Buddy Johnson.

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