“My dog even growled at me after that piece.”—DeLancy in the media: a timeline

Gautam Hathi:

To move on to the criticism as well, once you started doing this there were a lot of people who came out and there were articles written, I know Rachel Maddow did a thing, it was all a whole train of stuff. I also know there were accusations that you were racially motivated, partisan, whatever. What was you’re reaction, obviously that must have been a lot coming at you very quickly, so can you talk a little bit about what that was like and what your reaction to that was like?

Jay DeLancy:

Well, the year prior to that Maddow piece coming out I had taught at a high school that was 98 percent black, and I had teachers and students, I loved those people, I loved them. I had to leave, there were other reasons I had to go, but it was time to go and I spent a year there and it was just a wonderful experience. And then when I saw that Maddow piece.  It broke my heart that anybody at that school who saw that would think I’m a racist, and that just made me really angry. The way that happened was with our dead voters.  There was a lady, I think it was Carolyn Allen, there were 41 of them on the voter roll, and we matched the wrong Carolyn Allen to the wrong dead people. Yeah this was the WRAL piece. And they hunted around and they just happened to find a black woman. I wrote her a note. I told her it was nothing personal and I apologized to her. But she thought it was racially motivated. I don’t blame her. She got a letter in the mail saying someone’s challenging your right to vote and she’s an elderly lady and she’s going, “Oh lord, here we go again. 1960s all over again.”

But WRAL took that piece, Rachel Maddow grabbed it, they ran with it. It was very discouraging. My dog even growled at me after that piece. It was really bad, but it hurt and immediately, up to that night I had my cellphone on my website, because we were low key, just a bunch of…Picture a new movie called Bambi goes hunting, that was us. We were just doing the work, be-bobbing through the forest and boy, the bears came out that night. I got so many hateful phone calls. I wish I’d saved them. I saved one, but I wish I’d saved a bunch of them, because it was a real epiphany to just let people hear them and go wow. They came out that night. We got hit with a denial of service attack on our website, just the whole nine yards of what they do. And oddly enough it was only 12 hours after Media Matters had launched their first webpage on us that all this happened, so it looked like a leftist assault on what we’re doing. Which only made us go, “Wow, we must be onto something here.” So it had a reverse effect of encouraging us, number one, and number two, it’s okay, we’re going to do the research. And we had projects in the pipeline already that it’s like, whatever, you can say that all you want to but we were already onto our next project which was finding people in North Carolina and in Florida who had both voted, voted in both elections at the same time. And so we knew we were proving fraud and we weren’t really – It’s like, in the military we call it ground clutter, or ground chatter, or chaff, there’s varying terms for it, but it’s like, whatever. Okay, their shooting at us, yeah, but it’s expected. It was embarrassing and it hurt, but you brush yourself off the next day and go, okay, I’ve been wire brushed before, publicly, in front of a general officer and it’s like, it hurts, but he didn’t fire you, and in this case Rachel didn’t shoot me. She got our name right, so I figured in the long run, it’ll be okay. My wife was so mad, though, we took her off the email distribution because she saw the hateful emails and she was going crazy. I called my web guy, my web designer, up and said, “Take Casey off the webpage now, will you?” Because she was flipping out just seeing all these people saying these hateful things about her husband. So personally it was like a kick in the stomach, but that’s all it was.