The employees who had worked on political campaigns for other candidates told VoxPopuli that they have never had to wait this long for a final payment. Now, these employees want to send a message to candidates that they must pay their employees on time or they will have trouble hiring in the future. 

“ It needs to be a whistleblower on him so people would know not to never even think about working for him,” said Vicky Jordan, a campaign canvasser and phone banker. Her final paycheck was among the first batch to be distributed. Even so, she said, “That's not how you do business.”

Aubrey Jewett, PhD, a professor of political science at University of Central Florida, told VoxPopuli that most candidates pay employees “on Election Day or within a few days of it,” adding that campaign workers must be paid with funds from a candidate’s campaign account.  

This article is based on interviews with eight former employees of the Grayson campaign, some of whom requested anonymity because they have not been paid and were concerned that using their names could further delay their checks. 

Long delays

An experienced campaign worker, Jordan, a retiree who used to sell timeshares, was working for Democrat Travaris McCurdy’s campaign for Florida House District 40 when she decided she also wanted to support a Florida Senate candidate. She met Grayson’s campaign field operator and was hired to canvass neighborhoods and call voters. Canvassers said they put up Grayson signs in yards, left flyers at people’s homes and knocked on doors to talk to people about the Grayson campaign. 

Most of the 13 campaign employees that Jordan worked alongside were brought on in the last three weeks before the primary and were supervised by Veronica Hamer, the team lead. Jordan, Hamer and many others had worked together on other campaigns before the SD-15 race.

Canvassers were paid $25 per hour while phone bankers received $20 per hour. Jordan said they were getting paid weekly. All campaign employees interviewed by VoxPopuli reported they had received checks on time before the last week of the campaign, and they all worked until the campaign ended. 

When the final paychecks didn’t materialize in the first week after the election, Hamer’s team wanted an explanation. Hamer said that she sent all the final time logs to the field operator and that she calculated her team’s hours based on who signed in to canvass for the day and how long the team was out campaigning. 

As of Aug. 3, four people in Hamer’s group still had not received their final checks, though Hamer said the campaign told her the checks were mailed last week.

 ”You have rent, you got people that need medicine, and the reason they worked this campaign, is because they wanted him to win and [for the employees to] get paid,” Hamer said. “ There's no way nobody that worked for Mr. Grayson should be asking where their money is.” 

Grayson's financial disclosure form indicated his net worth is $8 million.

Patricia Williams, a senior who phone-banked for the campaign, said she did not get her last check until July 26. Williams said she “desperately needed the funds” for the 50 hours she worked during the last nine days of the campaign to supplement her “small monthly pension” and monthly Social Security check.

 ”Even on a trip down in Fort Pierce, out for my little Sunday school convention, every time I got a break, I would go out there and sit out there on the bench and make phone calls,” Williams said. 

Grayson told VoxPopuli that checks were sent out using Express Mail and that the campaign is uncertain of the status of the missing checks. 

Missing paychecks were not the only payment issue the campaign had. Sometimes the checks, issued from Grayson’s campaign account at Bank of America, bounced. 

Deirdre Myers, a caregiver for the elderly and mentally disabled who canvassed for the campaign for three weeks, said both the checks she received bounced, including one that came almost a month late. The campaign sent funds via Zelle to replace the first check. She went to Amscot to cash the second check, which added a $60 fee. 

 ”It was nonsense because if you got a Bank of America check, you should be able to cash it with no problem at Bank of America,” Myers said. “I've been with Bank of America for over 10 years, so they should have had no problem passing it, but they didn't.” 

Hamer said the first time she got paid, her check bounced and the campaign had to Zelle her the money instead. Hamer said two other employees on her team whose checks bounced also resorted to Amscot and incurred check-cashing fees.  

Grayson claimed the bank bounced valid checks “randomly” and “we haven’t been able to figure out why.” He said the campaign always “make[s] up for it when it happens.” He added via text message that the campaign has stopped using Zelle because the Zelle transfers have been rejected by the app, so the campaign is issuing new checks. 

Hamer responded to this saying that the four people on her team without checks are in need of the money now, and they would rather receive the money immediately through Zelle. She added that they also want to be compensated for the check-cashing fees they incurred.

Grayson said the campaign has never compensated employees for check-cashing fees, but added that if employees want compensation, they can “take it up with the campaign.” 

Time log irregularities

Grayson said the reason the employees were not paid on time is because the campaign found that “at least six” employees misrepresented hours they worked. He pointed to one employee who reported completing 19 hours of calls in a day, from 5 a.m. to midnight. He said he also  found canvassers reported hours past the campaign’s set canvassing hours. 

“ We had a large number of these discrepancies,” Grayson said. “We didn't have those kinds of obvious, visible problems before the last week.” 

Grayson said that he received the final tallies of employee hours from the field operator the week after the election and then went through the process of verifying the hours for every canvasser and phone banker with his campaign manager, Brook Hines. Part of the delay, Grayson said, was the difficulty in reviewing analytics through the phone banking app CallHub to check those hours. 

The campaign calculated that about $29,000 was owed to the 30 employees who worked the last week of the campaign. Grayson said the campaign is “close to the end of the process” of determining the amount overcharged, but said the campaign was overcharged by “thousands of dollars.”

He said that, to his knowledge, everyone who logged their hours correctly has been paid as of Aug. 1 and that checks were mailed out as an employee’s hours were verified. 

A former staffer who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation said the irregularities in phone banking hours happened because the campaign was paying people based on the time they were logged into the phone banking app CallHub. The staff member explained that while the campaign within CallHub was set to allow calls to voters for a certain amount of time, usually 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., users could log in at any time. 

The staff member said some staffers were “really enthusiastic” and worked many hours. But others figured out how to “stall” calls coming in during campaigning hours while remaining logged in so that they spent “significantly more” time clocked into the app than they spent making calls and “deliberately committed fraud.” 

Even so, the staff member said employees still waited an “extremely long” time for final paychecks even if work hours had to be verified. 

No police reports

Grayson’s canvassers said they heard many reasons for why their final paychecks were delayed — he was depressed about the election loss; he was moving additional money into his campaign account — but Hamer said they were never informed that timesheets were being verified for possible fraud. 

Grayson said he had a $30,000 surplus in his campaign account and that he thought the canvassers had been informed that some employees had tried to overcharge the campaign. 

“This was basically a problem that was manufactured at the last minute by people who messed it up for everybody,” he said about employees who were dishonest about their work hours. 

Hamer said “there was no overcharge anything” when it came to canvassers because she logged their hours for them. Yet she said members of her team who have waited longest for their checks were canvassers. 

“ I need for somebody to tell the truth,” Hamer told VoxPopuli on Monday. “Somebody needs to tell the truth of what's what with this situation.” 

Grayson said that those with irregular hours will be paid for the actual amount of hours completed that were verified and approved by the campaign, and he will not file police reports against any employee. 

Grayson said he understood why some of his campaign’s employees are upset, although it’s “fair to the campaign” to verify every employee’s hours.  

“ If I had handed in a proper amount of time and I had done my job and there was a delay in me getting paid, then I might be feeling bad about that,” Grayson said.