1. Compassion Seattle, the campaign for a proposed charter amendment on homelessness, recently posted a long and impressive list of endorsing organizations on their website, including more than half a dozen organizations that advocate for or provide services to people experiencing homelessness. The charter amendment would impose an unfunded mandate to add 2,000 shelter beds in a year using existing city funds, and would enshrine the policy of encampment sweeps in the city’s constitution.

The only problem? Most of the homelessness advocates on the list told us they never endorsed the initiative.

PubliCola contacted the Compassion Seattle campaign on Thursday morning to ask them how many of the groups on their list—which included the Downtown Emergency Service Center, Evergreen Treatment Services (which runs the REACH outreach program), the United Way of King County, and Farestart—had actually endorsed the measure.

We also contacted those four organizations, plus the Public Defender Association, the Housing Development Consortium, Plymouth Housing, and the Chief Seattle Club. Everyone but the HDC and Plymouth got back to us, and every group said they had not endorsed the initiative.

Jacque Seaman, vice president of the Fearey Group, told PubliCola that “the leaders of these organizations have been involved and expressed their support as you’ve seen; some are now going through their own internal processes to confirm endorsements.”

For a candidate to claim even one endorsement they don’t actually have is a major, newsworthy faux pas; for a campaign—particularly one run by a former Seattle City Council member and a longtime local public relations firm— to falsely claim at least six organizational endorsements is incredible.

In this case, the campaign used the apparent stamp of approval from homelessness advocates to suggest that Compassion Seattle is an equal partnership of do-gooder advocates and business groups, when the truth is that its funding comes almost entirely from large downtown property owners and other business interests, and its endorsement list is heavily weighted toward business associations, downtown groups, and individuals who want encampments out of sight.

It’s true that some of the groups on the list—notably Plymouth, DESC, and the PDA—contributed input that softened the measure, which originally focused almost entirely on encampment sweeps. And some of these groups may ultimately decide to endorse the proposal. But it’s sloppy at best, dishonest at worst, to claim support you don’t have, and the seasoned campaign professionals promoting this measure know better.

For now, Compassion Seattle has taken down its entire “Endorsements” page; Seaman said the campaign is “removing [the groups’] endorsements until they notify us their process is complete.”

2. Mayoral candidate Jessyn Farrell’s campaign released a poll to supporters showing former city council member Bruce Harrell solidly in the lead with 23 percent support. The campaign’s point wasn’t to highlight that Harrell is the frontrunner, though; it was to show that “the race for second in this two-way primary is wide open,” with no clear runner-up and 41 percent still undecided. Farrell was tied for third place with Colleen Echohawk at 7 percent support.

The campaign did not release the full results of the poll. In an email to supporters, they noted that while city council president Lorena González came in second with 11 percent and 65 percent name recognition, “her popularity ratings are net negative (31% favorable / 34% unfavorable),” which could “limit her growth potential.”

Harrell’s campaign sent a message to supporters saying, “one of our opponents just released a poll showing our campaign to end the infighting and excuses at City Hall is catching on!”

The González campaign said their own polling from March concluded that González is essentially tied with Harrell (a statistically insignificant 19 to 20 percent) and that “Colleen Echohawk and Jessyn Farrell trail González and Harrell by double digits, with nearly 4 in 10 voters undecided.” Their polling also has González with a much higher ratio of favorable to unfavorable ratings (36 to 21 percent) and shows Farrell’s share of the vote increasing by just 1 percent after an “informed introduction.”

Campaign polls describe each candidate using their biography, typically with a more positive and detailed biography for the candidate doing the poll, and use the resulting “informed introduction” number to demonstrate that their candidate’s ranking improves after voters are fully informed about the candidates. Each of the polls has a margin of error of more than 4 percent.