“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
~George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose” (1946)
If you’ve searched for anything about Santa Clarita’s local races this fall, you may have landed on one of two clean, official-looking voter guides. Type in your address, click “Find My Ballot,” and they tell you who’s running. Both swear they’re nonpartisan. The first calls itself an “independent, nonpartisan resource dedicated to helping SCV residents make informed decisions at the ballot box.” Neither is. Both were built by one of the biggest digital charlatans in Santa Clarita history: Brett Haddock. Or, if you’re going along with the silly rebrand (looking at you, Signal), Brett Haddoak.
And he’s on your ballot.
This is Part I of a two-part investigation, released together. Part II, “Charlatan, Bully, and Candidate,” is about the man behind the guides, and the name he used to go by.
The “nonpartisan” voter guide
The first is santaclaritavalleyvoterguide.com. That “independent, nonpartisan” line sits in the About section at the bottom of every page. Nowhere does the site tell you who runs it.
Check the code yourself. Open the site. Right click, choose View Page Source, and search for “oakworks.” You’ll find this:
var u="//analytics.oakworks.io/";
_paq.push(['setTrackerUrl', u+'matomo.php']);
_paq.push(['setSiteId', '9']);Matomo is analytics software, like Google Analytics, except you install it on your own server. This site sends every visit to analytics.oakworks.io. Oakworks Software is the company of Brett Haddoak, a candidate for Santa Clarita City Council District 2. The Signal reported this summer that he is its sole proprietor. The voter guide is registered on his server as site number 9. Nobody can put a website on your self-hosted analytics server except you.
The paper trail agrees. Cloudflare assigns each account a pair of nameservers, and every domain in that account uses that pair. Unrelated accounts can land on the same pair, so on its own this proves nothing. Next to the analytics code, it’s hard to explain away. Six domains sit on the identical pair, alex.ns.cloudflare.com and sara.ns.cloudflare.com, and all six are registered through Cloudflare:
oakworks.io, his software company
bretthaddoak.com, his blog
haddoakforsantaclarita.com, his campaign
teamhaddoak.com, the joint campaign site for him and his wife Rachelle
haddoakfornewhall.com, his wife Rachelle’s school board campaign
santaclaritavalleyvoterguide.com, the “independent, nonpartisan” guide
You can check any of them at dnsimple.com/whois. The guide’s domain was registered on July 22, 2022, during his wife’s first campaign. (It was also the middle of something else going on in Haddoak’s life that summer. That’s Part II.)
So here’s what the “independent, nonpartisan resource” actually is: a site built by a City Council candidate, running on his company’s server, covering his own race, on a domain he’s held since his wife’s first campaign.
Make that two guides. Search “Brett Haddoak” and you may land on the first guide, santaclaritavalleyvoterguide.com. Or you may land on a second one: santaclaritadistricts.com. Different name, different look, same pitch: “Nonpartisan voter information for the Santa Clarita Valley.” View its source and you’ll find the same Matomo tracker on the same analytics.oakworks.io server. The first guide is site number 9. This one is site number 11. Same races. Same labels. Same MAGA stamps. Same Find My Ballot button. Two websites, one owner, and site numbers on his analytics server that run to at least 11.
Its About section says: “This guide is written and kept by people who live here. It takes no money from campaigns, endorses nobody, and lists every candidate who has filed for a race whether we have heard of them or not.” It adds: “Where we have got something wrong, we would rather hear it than leave it standing.” People who live here. Haddoak is running for City Council. His wife Rachelle is running unopposed for the Newhall School District board. She was on his guide too, until she quietly wasn’t. His endorsers, Rep. George Whitesides and Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo, are on the ballot and on his guides. The people behind the “nonpartisan” guide have skin in the game on your ballot, and they chose not to be straight with you about it. That’s a problem.
How the thumb goes on the scale
I didn’t check every race on the site. I checked enough to see the pattern, and the pattern runs one direction. The contested races are mostly accurate, which is the point. A guide that got everything wrong would get laughed off. This one earns your trust where it plays straight, then cashes it in where it doesn’t.
The disappearing candidates. When I first looked in September, five county races showed a single candidate, as if unopposed. All five are November runoffs with two names on your ballot, and in four of them the candidate left off was the one who finished first in the primary.
For Sheriff, the guide showed Robert Luna and left off Alex Villanueva, who took 21.70 percent and is on your November ballot. He’s since been added. In Superior Court Seat 131, it shows David Ross and leaves off Donna Tryfman, who finished first with 37.31 percent. Seat 64 shows Maria Ghobadi and leaves off Rhonda Haymon, who took 42.15 percent. Seat 65 shows Anna Slotky Reitano and leaves off Justin Clayton, who finished first with 36.69 percent. Seat 87 shows David Dejute and leaves off Anthony (A.J.) Bayne, who finished first with 42.04 percent.
A voter who trusts this guide sees one name for judge and never learns there’s a choice. The second site goes further. On a site that promises it lists every candidate who has filed, it labels all four judges “running unopposed.” They aren’t.
Party labels where none exist. Judges, sheriff, city council, water board, and school board are all nonpartisan offices in California. No party appears next to those names on your actual ballot. The guide labels them anyway. Funny how that works. A site that swears it’s nonpartisan, handing out party labels for seats the law says don’t have one.
The MAGA dossiers. Then, eleven days before the election, it got worse. Party labels weren’t enough. The “nonpartisan” guide started stamping candidates “MAGA Republican Affiliated.” Seven of them, as of October 23. Every one is someone it wants you to vote against.
Start with his own race: Denise Lite, City Council District 2. Then Bob Khalsa in District 5. On the school boards, Anna Griese and Cindy Hallman in Saugus Union, and Bryan Biggers and Joe Messina in the Hart District. Messina’s opponent, Stacy Fortner, gets a sunny, smiling portrait and one tag: “Democratic.” Messina gets a dark stage shot, head down, eyes down, and three tags: “Republican,” “MAGA,” and “MAGA Republican Affiliated.” Literally cast in a negative light. And Jason Gibbs, running for Congress in the 27th. Plenty of other Republicans on the guide didn’t get the stamp. This isn’t a random sample. It reads like a wish list of the races Haddoak most wants to go his way, with his own right at the top.
Six of the seven are running for nonpartisan seats. Two Republicans are running against Haddoak. Only Lite got the MAGA stamp. Haddoak lists himself simply as “Democratic.”
Click into Lite’s page and you’ll find a section called “Republican & MAGA ties.” It’s a checklist: MAGA affiliated, MAGA endorsed, attends MAGA fundraisers, on MAGA mailers. No links. No dates. No documents. No sources for any of it. Meanwhile the same page swears its information comes from “candidate filings, official ballot documents, and public records.” Show me the public record for “attends MAGA fundraisers.”
Now click into Haddoak’s own page. No ties section. No endorsements, no fundraisers, no affiliations. The dossier format exists for his opponents.
What does “MAGA” even mean on this site? It doesn’t say. There’s no definition anywhere. Just a label and a checklist.
The quiet fixes. After I sent all of this to local media in September, some things changed. Villanueva showed up in the sheriff’s race. Water board president Maria Gutzeit, who the guide had labeled a Republican and stripped of her incumbent tag, is now correctly listed as No Party Preference and Incumbent. No correction notice. No explanation. Just quietly fixed. The four missing judicial candidates are still missing. The “nonpartisan” label is still on every page. His name is still nowhere on it. And while he was cleaning up, he added the MAGA stamps. A guide that hides candidates from your ballot and stamps opponents with unsourced labels, run in secret by a man on that ballot. That’s not protecting democracy. That’s the threat to democracy we keep hearing about, no?
In 2017, back when he went by Brett Haddock, he wrote a blog post called “Hallmarks of a Charlatan.” It’s still up on his site. Here’s how he says they operate: “They spend a great deal of effort to merely maintain the scam once it’s been started. Initially, you could see where they thought it was a quick buck. As time progressed, the required maintenance grew exponentially.”
His words. Not mine.
Where does your address go?
The “Find My Ballot” button asks for your home address. It doesn’t show you a ballot. It shows you a curated list of races, built by a candidate. And the site has no privacy policy. No terms of service. No statement of any kind about what happens to the address you type in.
Remember where the visitor tracking goes: a server owned by a man on the ballot. Now add a list of Santa Clarita voters, by home address, matched to the exact races they’ll vote in. Maybe that list never touches a campaign. Nobody who typed in their address could know either way, because the site never told them who was asking.
This is the same guy who, during a 2017 feud with a political rival, tweeted: “Good thing I already grabbed a copy of everything.” How that feud ended is in Part II.
No “paid for by.” Somebody is paying to register and host these domains, and there isn’t a “paid for by” disclaimer anywhere on either guide. California has specific rules on disclaimers for campaign communications and on reporting the money behind them. Whether these sites crossed those lines is for the FPPC to decide.
Questions Brett Haddoak should answer (but won’t)
The code already answers whether he built it. These are the questions left, and any reporter in town is welcome to them:
Why do two guides you run call themselves “nonpartisan” without telling voters that you’re a candidate on them?
Why are the runoff opponents missing from four judicial races, and why does one guide call those judges “running unopposed”?
What does “MAGA affiliated” mean, and where is the public record for any of it?
Who pays for the sites, and why is there no disclaimer?
Where do the addresses from “Find My Ballot” go?
If any fact in this piece is wrong, show me the receipt and I’ll correct it at the top. That’s more than his guides offer.
That’s what the guides do. Part II is about who built them. He used to go by a different name, and a court spent five and a half years keeping him away from the last man he called a charlatan. Read Charlatan, Bully, and Candidate.
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