On May 19, voters in the City of Los Angeles get to vote on more than just the special election propositions that the legislature has seen fit to saddle us with.  We also get to vote on certain elections that we just couldn’t manage to settle back in March.

Among those races, which include a couple of college board races and a hotly contested City Council race, is the runoff for City Attorney between City Councilmember Jack Weiss and attorney Carmen “Tru” Trutanich.  Now, it is not my intention–with this post, at any rate–to get into a discussion about the relative merits of the candidates.  No, my intention with this post is simply to chuckle publicly at the total incompetence of Tru’s web team.

Now, Carmen Trutanich has been going by the moniker “Tru” for the duration of this campaign–e.g. “a TRU crimefighter for City Attorney.”  As in, true.  Honest.  You get the idea.  Well, if you’re going to use the word “true” to define your campaign, there are certain things you need to make sure you do with it–which brings me to the subject of internet domains.

Now, Trutanich’s official site is tru09.com.  Fine.  Tru, and the election is in 09.  Got it.  But, of course, you always have to account for typos, bad memories, and misinterpretations.  Things like “true” instead of “tru” or “2009” instead of “09.”  Common sense things like that.

And on this count, Carmen Trutanich’s web team = FAIL.

Before getting started, view the regular site once on tru09.com before proceeding on this journey to hilarity.  First off, nice flash animation/movie trailer music.  Don’t you think?

So let’s get started.  Well, it appears that the only thing the “tru” web team counted on potential site visitors doing erroneously was keying “2009” instead of “09” into the address bar–because if you go to “tru2009.com” you get redirected to the main page.  So far, so good.

But apparently, they for some reason never thought that a campaign based on the word “true” might actually lead people to put the word “true” into the URL.  For instance, just watch what happens when you visit True09.com.  Same type of flash animation, and same Dungeons-and-Dragons video game music–which means that Tru’s team must own the site, or have used it experimentally, but just never bothered to redirect it.  But, that animation is all you get.  After the end of your lecture on the definition of the word “true”, you are in truth taken to random “stay informed” form–a website reminiscent of something Jean-Paul Sartre might have built had he shared his existentialism in our century.  Minor fail.

But here comes the major fail.  Tru’s team didn’t get true2009.com–which allowed his opponent, Jack Weiss, to turn it into attack site against him.  That’s just humiliating.  Now, I must say that the Weiss campaign needs to do a lot more with the page to seem effective themselves, but the idea that a campaign could be so inept as to leave one of their most prominent “domainsquatting” alternatives open to the opposing campaign to use as an attack site?  Absolutely unconscionable in the digital era.