A dozen paid operatives registered Sunday with Arizona’s secretary of state to collect signatures on behalf of left-wing presidential candidate Cornel West, listing their employer as a Republican-leaning firm that recently worked for GOP House candidate Blake Masters.
Arizona, unlike most states, requires paid or out-of-state petition-gatherers to register with the state. On their public registrations, some of circulators working to help West get on the ballot in Arizona struggled to spell his name, listing it as “Carnel west” or “Cornelle West.”
All checked boxes indicating they are out-of-state and that they are being paid. All listed Wells Marketing LLC — or some variation, with a few misspellings — as the company they are working for.
It’s unclear who is paying them. West’s campaign and Wells Marketing did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
NBC News recently uncovered Republican-linked operatives secretly collecting signatures for West in North Carolina, another key swing state. Last week, the Democratic majority on North Carolina’s State Board of Elections voted against giving initial ballot access to West, via a new political party started on his behalf, citing the NBC News report and other concerns.
West will have to collect tens of thousands of signatures to get on the ballot in Arizona, but it’s unlikely the West campaign is paying the circulators. The campaign is essentially broke, reporting in its most recent campaign finance report that it owed more money than it had on-hand. And the campaign has said it is ideologically committed to using volunteers instead of paid canvassers.
Wells Marketing collected signatures earlier this year for several Arizona Republican candidates, including Masters, state Rep. Justin Heap and GOP Senate candidate Elizabeth Jean Reye, according to the secretary of state’s records. It also reported working on behalf of Green Party Senate candidate Mike Norton, whom the Arizona Green Party has disavowed as one of two plants running on behalf of the major parties.
Some prominent Republicans have promoted West’s left-wing candidacy as a way to “take away votes from Joe Biden.” West is a famed Black academic and racial justice activist who has made a central focus of his campaign the plight of Gazans suffering during Israel’s war on Hamas.
Republicans looking to boost West have said they are focused on general election battleground states, like Arizona, where a few thousand votes may make the difference between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in November.