Carlo Loparo Gets His Revenge Using Craig’s List

A few months ago Governor Strickland, with bipartisan support from the General Assembly, put forward a solution to mend a huge hole in the state budget by allowing slot machines at Ohio’s race tracks.

Obviously it wasn’t the best possible solution, but it was, in fact, a solution – which is much more than any of the Republican legislatures had come up with at the time.

Enter Carlo Loparo. Loparo is a good friend of Ken Blackwell whose disasterous campaign for Governor he helped mismanage. He was also a highly paid consultant for the conservative ‘think tank’ (read: lobbying group disguised as a non-profit) The Buckeye Institue (a story for another post).

Since 2006 Loparo had been looking for a way to get revenge on the Governor and he saw this budget crisis as the perfect oportunity.

So Carlo gets together with a couple of his buddies and forms the group Let Ohio Vote, with the sole purpose of embarrassing the Governor by killing the plan to put slot machines (video lottery terminals or VLTs as they are called) at Ohio’s race tracks.

And it actually worked pretty well.

The Governor decided to pursue other options for closing the current hole in the budget and he put aside the slots-at-tracks plan.

But, as these revenge things often go, that wasn’t good enough for Loparo.

Nope.

He was going to make sure the Governor never, ever gets his way.

So he’s decided to go forward with collecting signatures to get the issue on the ballot next year.

How do I know this?

Because I saw this ad on Craig’s List.

petition circulators (columbus)

Make great money collecting signatures on state wide ballot measure (Ohio VLT). This position is commission only meaning you get paid per signature (1.25). This is an independent contractor position, and will last 30-60 days only. Make your own hours and days, great fulltime or part time job. This is not a get rich quick scheme, or multi-level marketing scam. This requires you to stand in front of a library, dmv, post office, or other public forum and talk to hundreds of people a day, who are not all going to be pleasant. But if you are self motivated and thick skinned you will do exceedingly well at this and make a good deal of money (our top circulators make $230.00 per day average). You will be paid 7 days after your first turn in and every subsequent turn in. Signatures are validated before payment is issued. As long as 75% of the people you get to sign are registered and at the correct address you get paid for all of them, even the invalid ones! Call to set up and interview at our local office (614) 405-1590

Hiring random people from Craig’s List and then paying them a buck twenty five per signature and only requiring that 75% of the signatures actually be valid? What could possibly go wrong?

It also seems worth noting that they need to collect nearly 250,000 signatures – and they are probably paying nearly 2 bucks a signature to the guy who is hiring the circulators. So they must have at least half a million bucks on hand. That is some seriously expensive revenge.