Ethics complaint filed against Chang-Diaz

Claimed paper had endorsed her

A Boston attorney said he filed a complaint with the state Ethics Commission yesterday because state Senate candidate Sonia Chang-Diaz falsely asserted on her website that she had been endorsed by the Spanish-language newspaper El Mundo.

Attorney Brian Monahan said that Natalie Hernandez based her decision to vote for Chang-Diaz instead of incumbent Senator Dianne Wilkerson in the September primary on her belief that the challenger had been endorsed by the paper.

Other Hispanic voters also took the endorsement into account, he said.

"They are members of the Latino community and they read the newspaper and the endorsement of that paper was a big factor for them in deciding to vote for Ms. Chang-Diaz," Monahan said last night.

He could not immediately provide Hernandez's age or neighborhood, but he said she lives in the Second Suffolk District.

Chang-Diaz narrowly defeated Wilkerson in the September primary, but Wilkerson is waging a sticker campaign in next week's general election to retain her seat.

The political news website PolitickerMA.com reported on the endorsement claim last week.

El Mundo editor Alberto Vasallo told the website that while another editor at the paper, Maximo Torres, had penned a column endorsing Chang-Diaz, it did not represent an endorsement from the newspaper.

The campaign has removed the false endorsement from its website.

Boyce Slayman, Wilkerson's campaign manager, said the campaign did not plan to challenge the results of the primary or make an issue out of the endorsement in the sticker campaign.

"If there were more time, we might want to participate in some fact-finding, but there's not enough time for us to do this," he said.

But he added that he did believe the false endorsement may have swayed some votes.

"I know that El Mundo as a general policy doesn't endorse, so I could see where people who read El Mundo and saw that this woman had been endorsed might believe this was an exceptional case," he said.

"It was absolutely an honest mistake," Deborah Shah, Chang-Diaz's campaign manager, said last night. "We considered because it was coming from the editor that it was an endorsement. As soon as I learned about it, we called the publisher to just confirm."

The campaign then took down the endorsement, she said.

"Obviously we take any complaint to the Ethics Commission seriously, because no one wants to get on the wrong side of the Ethics Commission," Shah said. "But we see this as desperate campaign tactics. When you have nothing else to say, you start slinging mud."

Monahan said he has no ties to Wilkerson's campaign, and he is not listed as a contributor or paid consultant on Wilkerson's campaign finance statements.

Monahan said he did not expect the Ethics Commission to issue a ruling on the complaint before Election Day.

Chang-Diaz has criticized a string of ethical transgressions by Wilkerson in making the case that she will bring ethics and accountability to the seat.

Wilkerson's campaign also has faced charges that she claimed false endorsements. For a period following the primary, her campaign website continued to list the names of politicians who had supported her primary bid, but who had switched their endorsements to Chang-Diaz for the general election following the challenger's win in the primary.

Wilkerson's website no longer lists any endorsement.

John Drake can be reached at jdrake@globe.com.