Race implication

After we talked greatly about the racial conflicts in the 19th and 20th century, a news story I stumbled upon intrigued me. The story is that a White Republican won a seat on Houston's district two board of trustee's by misleading voters into believing he was black. Dave Wilson, a middle-aged white man, sent out campaign flyers depicting many African American people on them, and no pictures of himself. These flyers not only contained misleading pictures, but he wrote he was "endorsed by Ron Wilson". Ron is a long time state representative that happens to be black. Underneath this endorsement read the words "Don Wilson and Dave Wilson are cousins". The immediate thought is that this is slander, and Dave Wilson lied to a whole community of voters, but that is not completely true. Dave does have a cousin named Ron Wilson, who currently resides in Iowa. A local news station interviewed Dave about this topic and reported his response:  "He's a nice cousin," Wilson says, suppressing a laugh. "We played baseball in high school together. And he's endorsed me." (WFAA Report- Doug Miller) The rest of the article can be found here. Dave released many more flyers like the one below, in which never say that he is black, but one would immediately assume he was after reading the flyer. As an older White Republican living in an overwhelming black democratic district, it seemed as if he had little hope. He won the election by a mere 26 votes. Wilson even admitted after the fact he never thought he would actually win. After reading about this, I began to wonder if Dave Wilson is in the wrong in this scenario. Of course it doesn't seem very ethical to mislead innocent voters, but he technically did nothing illegal. There are most certainly better, and more fair ways to win an election, but in politics, anything is fair game. I do not believe Wilson did the "wrong" thing. He did what he needed to in order to win, which is the whole point of an election is it not?