The 2018 Municipal Election is right around the corner and there's been another case of election-sign tampering, this time in Essex, and this time it was caught on video surveillance.
Ward 8 Candidates Greg LeMay and Lisa Valente noticed signs began to go missing earlier this month in Windsor, but over the weekend Essex Mayoral Candidate Rob Shepley was the latest victim of sign tampering.
A chuckling Shepley took it in stride, he tells AM800 News a video showing a heavy-set man walking through Essex Town Centre simply pulling signs out of the ground and dropping them.
"We found that someone had come along and knocked down every sign in the front here and random places throughout town on the main street," he says. "He seemed to be just targeted to my signs for some reason."
Shepley says he got lucky, he only had to put the signs back up — he feels for other candidates who've had to replace signs over the past few months.
"The signs are extremely expensive for us and some of us are paying out of pocket," says Shepley. "It's just a real shame that they would take the time to destroy them."
Like LeMay and Valente in Windsor, he's not looking to throw the book at anybody; he just wants it to stop.
"I'm sure somebody knows who it was and maybe he's just embarrassed that everybody may have seen his video footage now and hopefully it stops. I didn't plan on charging anybody," he says. "Just let us run our campaign fair and square."
Katie McGuire-Blais, Ron Rogers, and Larry Snively are also running for mayor.
The 2018 Municipal Election is set for Oct. 22.