Arizona man’s phone number mistakenly listed as Kari Lake’s campaign headquarters
By Elliott Polakoff
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LAKE HAVASU, Arizona (KTVK, KPHO) — For most of us, political phone calls and text messages stopped on election day. But for 82-year-old Lake Havasu resident Ed Wignall, that was just the beginning of what’s been a month of hundreds of calls. That’s because his phone number was mistakenly listed on Google as a way to reach Kari Lake’s campaign headquarters.
“At first, I was upset with the whole thing like anybody else,” Wignall said. “And then I tried to figure out how to turn it off.”
But no matter how hard Wignall tried, the calls kept coming. People told Wignall they called the phone number in the Google contact info for Lake’s campaign headquarters. “I just decided to make this into a science project,” he said. “And have been taking calls ever since. It’s just mainly been me listening.”
What Wignall hears is anger about the current state of politics in Arizona. “They’re really disgusted with all the fear and hate speech, and all the ads on both sides,” he said. “It’s just overwhelming.”
Wignall’s response to each phone call starts by saying that he is, in fact, not with Lake’s campaign, he’s just a normal Arizona resident. But with a background in social psychology, his listening skills lead to longer, constructive conversations. “The ones that I got to engage, which were a lot, some of those have run 15 minutes,” he said. “And they’re tickled to death that they have somebody to listen.”
Sometimes so much so that the conversation turns into something more. “I was talking to this guy from Phoenix who has an air conditioning company,” Wignall said. “And he says Ed any time you need that air conditioner fix, you just call me up.”
By the end of these phone calls, any anger has turned into comfort, not just for those calling but also for Wignall. “It’s made something that was really terrible into something really that’s been quite interesting and enjoyable,” he said.
Arizona’s Family reached out to a Lake campaign spokesperson, who says they contacted Google last Friday to try and get them to remove Wignall’s number from the website search. But they say Google hasn’t done anything about it four days later. We also reached out to Google to try and learn how Wignall’s number ended up there in the first place, but did not receive a response.
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