In the home stretch of a contentious Akron school board race, members of an influential political action committee strongly rebuked the release of candidate endorsements they say were falsely attributed to the organization.
The mid-October endorsements of Carla Jackson, Diana Autry, Gwen Bryant and Cynthia Blake, in a flyer labeled as being from the People’s Convention Political Action Committee, featured a glowing statement from the PAC’s president and attached a moniker to the four candidates of “The Q.U.A.D.” — “Qualified & United For Academic Distinction.”
The endorsement preceded an Oct. 21 statement on social media attributed to PC PAC President N. Roy Hodoh denouncing the “fraudulent use of our organization’s name” which “undermines the integrity and values that PC PAC upholds in all political and community engagements.” The group “will not tolerate any misuse of our name or reputation,” the statement said, and it won’t make any endorsements in the race.
None of the four candidates are accused of any wrongdoing related to the endorsement. Two of the four candidates in the since-revoked endorsement reached by Signal Akron — Jackson, a Republican, and Bryant, a Democrat — said they didn’t seek the endorsements, don’t know how any of the decisions were made and did not promote the endorsements in their campaigns.
“I’m not chasing down endorsements. That’s part of my whole thing,” Jackson said.
“I am running my own race, I’m not aligning with anyone,” Bryant said.
Bryant was left off the Summit County Democratic Party’s sample ballot, which encourages votes for four other candidates, none of whom were in the PC PAC endorsements. She said she believes she was left off because she was included in the rescinded endorsement, along with Jackson and Blake, the only registered Republicans of the eight candidates in the race.
John Fuller, a member of the political agenda committee for the PAC, told Signal Akron on Friday that after the organization’s candidate forum on Oct. 8, the group discussed endorsements but had not officially sanctioned them prior to the false endorsement’s release.
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Police report filed against APS administrator, daughter of PAC’s president
The dueling October statements (the endorsements and the statement revoking them) attributed to 82-year-old Roy Hodoh appears to have sparked an Oct. 28 incident between the person listed in campaign finance filings as the PAC’s treasurer and Hodoh’s daughter, Stacey Hodoh, an Akron Public Schools administrator. The treasurer filed a report with Akron Police against Stacey Hodoh.
The longtime family friend of the Hodohs stated in the report that PC PAC members voted to publicly release the elder Hodoh’s statement “regarding our group name being used without our permission for endorsement candidates” on Facebook. The following week, Stacey Hodoh approached her in the parking lot after a school board candidate forum at Garfield Community Learning Center.
Signal Akron reviewed security footage from the school that shows Stacey Hodoh followed the woman and two others from inside the building to the front parking lot, where they exchanged words before they got in their cars and left in separate directions.
“She asked me to take it down and I told her no,” the treasurer states in the police report of Stacey Hodoh, who is the school district’s strategic communications and media director and interim executive director of technology. “… I walked away because she was getting very aggressive and loud. She then continued to follow me and harassed [me] about the post and the group. She made a comment that I’m going to regret this.”
Stacey Hodoh told Signal Akron her elderly mother was upset that members were sharing the endorsement revocation attributed to Roy Hodoh “because it unfairly suggests, perhaps, that those four ladies that were on that flyer did something wrong because of the word ‘fraudulent.’” Stacey Hodoh said she was just backing her mom’s wishes.
“Well, ‘you will regret this’ —– this sounds like a silly question, but is there a law against saying ‘you will regret this?’” Stacey Hodoh asked Signal Akron in an interview Saturday. In a statement sent afterward, she said it was a request, not a demand, that the treasurer delete the post.
She wrote in the statement that “the person who designed the social media claim of ‘fraud’ is unknown.”
Stacey Hodoh told Signal Akron that the Oct. 28 police report filed by the treasurer is “a calculated tactic to publicize an unusually disjointed PC PAC endorsement process, with the effect of minimizing any potential influence or future endorsements by PC PAC.”
She also called the police report “a calculated decision to get controversial media coverage on me. My attorney will vehemently address any frivolous civil claims made against me” by the treasurer.
The group’s treasurer did not tell Signal Akron about the police report and declined to comment for this story.
Stacey Hodoh would not answer questions as to whether she was involved with or responsible for the “Q.U.A.D” endorsements. She said she is not a voting member of the PAC and merely helped her elderly, wheelchair-bound father with administrative tasks.
“It’s such a private matter, it’s not a public organization,” she said about why she wouldn’t explain how the original fraudulent endorsements of the school board candidates were made public following the Oct. 8 PC PAC community forum for candidates. “It’s a private, nonpartisan organization and I believe they also deserve some privacy. … The inner workings of the organization, their governance, how they make decisions — that’s private.”
Editor’s note: An article published in The Reporter Newspaper this week with the headline “PC PAC Endorses Candidates” was submitted by John Dadisi Fuller on behalf of the Akron Chapter of the Pan African Revolutionary Socialist Party, not the People’s Convention Political Action Committee.