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Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Politics: Phone-jam scam
As political dirty tricks go, it was a particularly sleazy one. In the 2002 New Hampshire Senate race, state Republican Party officials hired a telemarketing firm to jam up the phone lines at the office of a firefighters association offering voters rides to the polls.
The idea was to make it more difficult for presumably Democratic voters to cast ballots -- particularly those who were elderly, disabled, poor or otherwise in need of a ride.
Telemarketers repeatedly called the firefighters' office and then immediately hung up as soon as the phone was answered.
The Republican, John Sununu, won the election, defeating Democrat Jeanne Shaheen by a solid 5 percent. But regardless of the impact on the results, the intent was to disenfranchise voters.
Rightly so, three people have been convicted in the case, including the Republicans' New England regional director, James Tobin. During his trial, during which the national Republican Party paid millions of dollars in Tobin's legal fees, evidence was introduced that Tobin had made more than 100 phone calls to an office in the White House, two dozen of them in three days around Election Day 2002. Occupying that office at the time was Ken Mehlman, who is now Republican National Committee chairman.
Democratic Party officials are right to demand to know if there was a White House connection to the trick, rather, the crime committed in New Hampshire.
Remember that "third-rate break-in"?
Tell us what's on your mind.
 | |
| Are political dirty tricks just part of the game, or criminal acts? | |
 12.2%Part of the game; lighten up. |
86.4% Intentional efforts to block voting constitutes a crime. |
| 1.4% Don't know or care. |
|
| Total Votes: 427 | |
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