A Prankster Has Snatched the “Mark Farrell for Mayor” Website

Screenshot from MarkFarrellForMayor.com

There’s a long history (well for the internet anyways) of pranksters nabbing what would be an ideal website for a political candidate before the candidate has a chance to buy it themselves. And usually the prankster makes the website a spoof to undermine the candidate and/or air out some dirty laundry.

Back in 2011, NewtGingrich.com was used to reroute visitors to info about Gingrich’s allegedly shady dealings. Similarly, JebBush.com was used redirect people to Donald Tump’s campaign site back in 2016. There’s actually a ton of examples, some quite clever, in this article from GovTech.com.

Well, this kind of pranksterism has now hit our local mayor’s race.

Someone – who is definitely not a fan of former supervisor and current mayor candidate Mark Farrell – owns the website MarkFarrellForMayor.com and they are using it to spill some tea.

There’s not much on the website other than a list of Mark Farrell’s various alleged transgressions. For example, there is:

In 2015, Farrell was fined $191,000 by the San Francisco Ethics Commission for violating campaign finance laws in his 2010 race for Supervisor.

• • Farrell refused to pay. The Ethics Commission sent him to collections. So Farrell sued the city.

And there’s also:

In 2021, Farrell wrote a letter to the Napa Superior Court on “Mayor of San Francisco” letterhead requesting leniency for his “close personal friend” who was charged with Domestic Violence.

While the website owner doesn’t say this explicitly, you can tell they really don’t want Mark Farrell to win the Mayoral race.

Screenshot from MarkFarrellForMayor.com showing Farrell with Mohammed Nuru, the former head of the Department of Public Works who was convicted of corruption.

To make matters even more complicated for Farrell, when I googled “Mark Farrell for Mayor” just now, the first thing that came up was  MarkFarrellForMayor.com. Farrell’s official website, MarkFarrell.com was third on the search results.

A screenshot showing that the MarkFarrellForMayor site is the first thing that came up in the google search

While I am absolutely dreading the 2024 election season, at least things like this make it far more entertaining.