Opposing candidates each claim documents back up their plagiarism charges

Two state Senate candidates who accuse each other of plagiarism produced documentation Sunday that didn’t quite get to the bottom of their competing claims.

Republican Owen Hill and Libertarian Doug Randall each are running against incumbent Democrat Sen. John Morse in Colorado Senate District 11, which covers much of Colorado Springs’ downtown, west-side and southeast neighborhoods.

The campaign websites for Hill and Randall each contain extended passages on various issues — jobs, education, fiscal policy — that are almost identical. Each candidate accuses the other of stealing the words.

On Sunday, Randall provided The Gazette with printouts that he said were e-mails between him and his sister and brother. The printouts contained passages that bear a strong resemblance to those on both candidates’ sites. They were drafts of his issue statements, he said, and he passed them along to his siblings for their feedback in May and July.

Well, then, case closed, said Chris McIntire, a spokesman for the Hill campaign. The same passages have been on Hill’s website since January.

As evidence, McIntire provided The Gazette with a printout that he said was from the administration area of Hill’s site. It shows a blog post made on Jan. 11. It also shows that the post contains the three contested passages.

“That proves our point,” McIntire said. “Our content has been up for all to see.”

Randall insists the contested material appeared on Hill’s website only in the past week.

“They can make up what they want to,” Randall said. “I know I wrote it, and the people around me know I wrote it.”

Because The Gazette does not have administrative access to either candidate’s computers or websites, the printouts supplied by Randall and McIntire could not be authenticated. It’s possible to fabricate e-mails, just as it’s possible to fabricate or change the publication date of blog posts.

Sorting out the competing claims is made more complex by the fact that the Hill campaign is running separate websites that have a nearly identical appearance. However, they have different URLs and do not display the same material under the “issues” category.

The first Hill site can be found at http://owenhillforsenate.com. The “issues” category contains three paragraphs of discussion about jobs and the economy. It contains none of the wording being challenged by Randall.

A second, separate, Hill site can be found at http://owenhill.wordpress.com. The “issues” category of this site contains three passages that Randall claims were lifted from him, and that McIntire says are original to Hill.

A search on whois.net, a service that traces the ownership and origins of Internet sites, indicates that the first website was created Nov. 7, 2009. Whois.net was unable to find any information about the second.

However, at least two posts on the second site have January 2010 dates on them, which could be an indication that the site has been active at least that long. In the “issues” section of that same site, however, the contested passages do not include a publication date.

Randall insisted on Sunday that only he and his siblings had seen the writings until they showed up on Hill’s second website only last week. And that must mean, he said, that someone reached into his own server and lifted the work before Randall had a chance to post them on his campaign site.

To which McIntire responded: “It’s getting beyond belief. This is a serious campaign, a serious time for Colorado. We’re trying to have this discussion, and this guy is making bald-faced accusations, bald-faced lies.”

UPDATE: A gazette.com reader has posted a comment on this story reporting that in November 2009, Hill used Twitter.com to post a quote by the English writer G.K. Chesterton: "Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another." The Gazette has verified that the Chesterton quote was, in fact, posted on that date under Hill's Twitter account. That same quote appears as an introduction to the education policy statment on Hill's campaign website, which campaign spokesman Chris Mcintire said was created in January 2010. The same quote also appears in the same fashion accompanying the education policy statment on Randall's campaign website, which was created several months later.