Background

Enterprising gaming developers had targeted Volusia County FL for a horse racetrack through a backdoor legislative maneuver. These special interest had found a loophole in the law dealing with quarter horses that would allow them to bypass local voters altogether in establishing a race track. Our clients opposed the measure and dubbed it the “Quarterhorse Scam” as they geared up to kill the development. At the outset, there wasn’t much news coverage on the issue, so a lot of people, including the City Council, didn’t know about the scam.

Our goal was to incite the electorate about this scam and work up the chain of elected officials until we killed the measure once and for all. We chose not to debate the merits of horseracing, or gaming in general. Instead, we chose a more universal villain: special interest groups trying to take power out of the hands of voters.

Starting small, we built a live patch-through program to explain the complicated scam to voters. Once they heard that special interests were trying to con them, we patched the voters through to their City Council members. We found voters were clearly angry at the potential of a racetrack in their back yard with no local input.

The Daytona Beach News Journal reported that a local councilman told the developers that “I got 150 calls and emails and now I have been handed 74 more” and said, “you opened a hornet’s nest…this community is dead-set against this.” This response to the first phase gave us the validation we needed to crank it up a notch. We ended up introducing two additional phases of the program, next patching voters to their State Representatives and finally transferring callers to the Governor’s office.