With six days to go before Harrisonburg voters head to the polls, Councilwoman Monica Robinson’s reelection website is asking for contributions of up to $1,500 without the one line Virginia law requires on every campaign site: a statement telling voters who paid for it.
The site, electmonicarobinson.com, carries no “Paid for by” or “Authorized by” statement on any page. Where that disclosure should be, the footer instead reads: “Campaign disclaimer language will be provided by the campaign.”
What the law requires
Virginia’s “Stand by Your Ad” law treats campaign websites the same as yard signs and mailers. Va. Code § 24.2-955.1 lists websites and email in its definition of “print media,” and § 24.2-956 requires a candidate’s print advertising to say who paid for it, using the committee name on file with election officials. A candidate promoting only herself may use the shorter “Authorized by” followed by her name. On a website, one page carrying the statement is enough.
This is not a technicality. The disclosure is how voters know a message comes from the candidate and not from some outside group. A violation carries a civil penalty of up to $25,000, and a willful violation is a Class 1 misdemeanor. The State Board of Elections decides these cases after a public hearing.
The closest thing on the site is a copyright line reading “© 2026 Monica Robinson for Harrisonburg City Council.” That does not say who paid for or authorized the site, and it does not match the committee’s registered name. According to the amended Statement of Organization filed in June, the committee is registered as “MonicaRobinson4reelection.”
Built by AI, never finished
The likely explanation is less sinister than careless. The site’s own code shows it was built with GoDaddy’s Airo AI Builder, a tool that generates pages, layouts, and starter text from a short description. Its pages still point back to an airoapp.ai address, and its images load from an “airo-assets” folder.
The giveaways are in the text. The footer placeholder about disclaimer language reads like an AI’s note to itself. The homepage says “Volunteer and contribution tools will be available soon,” while the Contribute page already links to working ActBlue donation forms. Each donation level has a “View details” button, as if it were a product in an online store.
Someone did feed the tool real material: Robinson’s committee assignments, her quotes, her photos. But nobody went back to fill in the blank the law actually requires.
A closer look at the endorsements
The site’s Endorsements page features three names. Two of them deserve more scrutiny than the campaign gave them.
Paul Somers is listed as former owner of The Golden Pony, the downtown music venue and bar that closed in June. In February, Virginia ABC fined the business $7,500 and suspended its alcohol license for 30 days after an employee served an undercover, underage ABC buyer. When Somers announced the closing in May, he cited rising costs and falling sales and told WHSV the ABC penalty played a role. His endorsement now leads with Robinson’s “encouraging message” when the Pony announced it was closing.
Crimson Solano, listed only as a “community leader and advocate,” was the press contact on Nexus Services news releases in 2019 and 2020 and spoke publicly for ARMED, an advocacy group closely tied to Nexus.
Nexus and its owners now sit under a mountain of court judgments. The largest came in 2024, when a federal court in the Western District of Virginia entered an $811 million judgment against Nexus, its subsidiary Libre by Nexus, and owners Micheal Donovan, Richard Moore, and Evan Ajin. The CFPB and the attorneys general of Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts had sued over deceptive and abusive practices targeting detained immigrants who needed bond, and the Fourth Circuit upheld the judgment. Add a $3.3 million judgment won by the company’s former bond insurer, a $3.2 million judgment owed to a class of former Libre clients, judgments for unpaid legal fees and wages, and a string of smaller debts, and court records show more than $825 million in money judgments. With federal post-judgment interest, The Republitarian estimates the total at roughly $935 million.
Solano was not a defendant in any of these cases. But his endorsement praises Robinson’s work for immigrant families without mentioning the company he once spoke for.
Voters can decide for themselves how much those connections matter. The campaign chose not to tell them.
The paperwork has gaps too
The committee’s amended Statement of Organization, effective June 2, 2026, leaves the “Campaign Website” field blank. State instructions say to list the site or write “N/A,” and to file an amendment within 10 days whenever reported information changes. The same form leaves blank the dates of the first contribution and first expenditure, even though the campaign is now raising money online.
None of this means Robinson set out to hide anything. It does mean a sitting council member, asking voters for another term and for their money, published a campaign site without checking it against the most basic disclosure rule on the books. Voters who think that matters can file a Stand by Your Ad complaint with the Virginia Department of Elections, which accepts them online with screenshots as evidence.
Fixing it takes one sentence: “Authorized by Monica Robinson.”
Sources
- Va. Code § 24.2-956
- Va. Code §§ 24.2-955 through 24.2-955.3
- electmonicarobinson.com
- GoDaddy: Airo AI Builder
- Virginia Department of Elections: Campaign Finance Laws and Policies
- WHSV: Golden Pony hit with Va. ABC penalties
- WHSV: The Golden Pony to close in June
- Business Wire: Nexus Services release listing Crimson Solano as contact (March 2020)
- Daily News-Record: Wilmore sues Mayor Reed (Solano as ARMED spokesman)
- New York Attorney General: $811 million judgment against Libre by Nexus
- American Banker: Fourth Circuit upholds Nexus judgment