ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. – A former St. Johns County School Board candidate says her name and photo appearing on fraudulent voter guides during the 2024 election continues to affect her reputation, even though she says she had no knowledge of or involvement in creating them.
Lynn Straughan, who ran for the District 5 school board seat in 2024, said she was unaware her name and photo would be used on the guides and never gave anyone permission to include her.
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“I want to make sure that people understand that just because my name and picture appeared on that voter guide, that I had nothing to do with it,” she said.
Straughan said she became aware of an investigation into the voter guides during the 2024 campaign. She said the controversy made it difficult for her to campaign because her name appeared on voter guides displayed at Republican Party of St. Johns County tents.
According to Straughan, the Republican Party’s voter guide displayed the fraudulent guide alongside other guides and labeled the other guides as fake.
She said the situation forced her to spend much of the campaign defending herself rather than focusing on her candidacy.
“I felt like I had been in a war,” Straughan said of the campaign.
Now, with criminal charges filed in connection with the alleged fraudulent voter guides, Strawn said she is once again having to explain that she had no role in their creation.
She said she filed a complaint with the Florida Elections Commission before the 2024 primary and also contacted the Florida secretary of state’s office after seeing how the guides were affecting her campaign.
Straughan said she does not know who created the guide and was surprised to learn more about the people allegedly connected to it.
She also said the controversy has a potential impact beyond her political career.
Straughan is president of Kids Bridge, a nonprofit supervised visitation center that works with children and families involved in situations including abuse, neglect and domestic violence.
The organization supervises visits between children and parents when court orders require supervised visitation. Some children involved in the program live in foster care, while others live with a custodial parent.
Straughan said she has spent about 24 years fundraising for Kids Bridge, making her reputation particularly important.
“If you’re going to raise money for a nonprofit in any place in this country, your integrity has to be stellar,” Straughan said.
She worries that seeing her name and photo repeatedly associated with the fraudulent voter guides could cause people to question whether she had any involvement in the scheme.
“I don’t ever want there to be any hesitation in anyone’s mind when they donate to Kids Bridge that, well, this person could possibly be involved in something that was a criminal activity,” she said.
Straughan said she is following the criminal case and is glad election officials took the allegations seriously and continued investigating.
But she said it remains frustrating to see the voter guides displayed in news coverage because her photo and name are still visible.
“It’s just made my life more difficult,” she said.
Strawn said the experience has also made her hesitant to run for political office again.
“It would take a lot of soul searching to do that,” she said.
Ultimately, Straughan said she hopes the case reinforces the importance of reporting questionable election activity.
“I just want to make sure that we can still trust the whole election process and that when people do see things, that they do report it,” she said.